165 Quotes & Sayings By Jack Kerouac

Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same. Jack Kerouac

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves. Jack Kerouac

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. Jack Kerouac

It is possible for the human spirit to win after all. Jack Kerouac

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness — I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are — and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation. Jack Kerouac

The golden eternity is { } Jack Kerouac

Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running–that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all. . Jack Kerouac

And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change. . Jack Kerouac

They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me. Jack Kerouac

Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone Jack Kerouac

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved. Jack Kerouac

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears... Jack Kerouac

One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree. Jack Kerouac

And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing, " I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep. Jack Kerouac

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born. Jack Kerouac

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. Jack Kerouac

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Jack Kerouac

And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon. Jack Kerouac

In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted. Jack Kerouac

Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind. Jack Kerouac

We've got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong. Jack Kerouac

Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it. Jack Kerouac

Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last. Jack Kerouac

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. Jack Kerouac

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk – real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. Jack Kerouac

The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled. Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby - Talk about yr hot peace. Jack Kerouac

I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. Jack Kerouac

How is there laughter, how is there joy, as this world is always burning? Jack Kerouac

They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-" Where are you going?" which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, "Where are you going?"- Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society "Looking for peace. Jack Kerouac

A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time. Jack Kerouac

Be in love with your life. Every minute of it. Jack Kerouac

After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living, ' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds... Jack Kerouac

I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can. Jack Kerouac

Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not "publishing's" - Jack Kerouac

The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words. Jack Kerouac

I feel impossibly sad and like I'll die, what can we do? Jack Kerouac

Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts. Jack Kerouac

Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips? Jack Kerouac

Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends .. . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word .. . choked forever. Jack Kerouac

We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco. Jack Kerouac

I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity's true and perfectly empty nature. Jack Kerouac

Jesus was a strange hobo who walked on water– Jack Kerouac

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls. Jack Kerouac

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. Jack Kerouac

Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars... Jack Kerouac

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. Jack Kerouac

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. Jack Kerouac

I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - air you can kiss - and palms. Jack Kerouac

He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there. Jack Kerouac

There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go. Jack Kerouac

Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me-- I didn't understand. . Jack Kerouac

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301). Jack Kerouac

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235). Jack Kerouac

And what do I think about? What thoughts do I have! - What thoughts! a whole host, multitude, and world of thoughts, I keep devising new ones and reworking old ones, some of the old ones are concluded and are only thought of as conclusions, whole worlds of new ones come crashing into my fingers, and it never ends. Jack Kerouac

…of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth. Jack Kerouac

It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now – girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever. Jack Kerouac

Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate. Jack Kerouac

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact, " not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why. Jack Kerouac

The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow. Jack Kerouac

You're a Genius all the time Jack Kerouac

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much. Jack Kerouac

...the restaurant itself is weird especially because of a big raunch mad thicklipped sloppy young Fillipino woman sitting alone at the end of the restaurant gobbling up her food obscenely and looking at us insolently as tho to say "Fuck you, I eat the way I like splashing gravy everywhere (p. 156) Jack Kerouac

Whatever anyone does, / anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror) Jack Kerouac

I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go. Jack Kerouac

..that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was– I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. Jack Kerouac

You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" We didn't understand his question, and it was a damned good question. Jack Kerouac

I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true…it’s like finding a river of gold when you haven’t even got a cup to save a cupful…you’ve but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness. Jack Kerouac

Is Virgin you trying to fathom me Jack Kerouac

Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. Jack Kerouac

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of. Jack Kerouac

I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’spractically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, ofcourse. Jack Kerouac

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all. Jack Kerouac

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. Jack Kerouac