Jack Kerouac quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jack Kerouac on Wise Famous Quotes.

They'll eat your heart alive Every time.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.

All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

I want to marry a girl," I told them, "so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old.

Down in Denver, all I did was die.

and silence is the golden mountain

Both of us had a lot to say, but there was no room to say it in, we were so tense and close.

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.

A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street ...

Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda philosophy or social system that puts down sex said Japhy (Gary Snyder)

Snap your finger
stop the world -
rain falls harder

Now this warm thought of greatness is a big chill in the wind - for

I left with my canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the fifty dollars in my pocket.

And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I went into the West.

Most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

There was a sound of slapping
When the angel stole come
And the angel that had lost
Lay back satisfied

I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.

My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.

I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.

Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.

The tree looks like a dog, barking at heaven.

Details are the Life of Prose.

Night is longer than day for those who dream & day is longer than night for those who make their dreams comes true.

Be in love with yr life

Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.

I don't want to be courageous, my emotions are against it; I want to be happy

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

What is the universe
but a lot of waves
And a craving desire
is a wave ...

The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.

Dreams were so irrational, so gray with a nameless terror ... and yet, too, so haunting and beautiful.

Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?

What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?

With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it.

Hell! I'm glad I did it. It's going to be a change. I
call this life!

What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?" I asked. "I don't know," he said. "I just go along. I dig life.

I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back to New York.

the road is life

But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.

History becomes fiction in the ... act of being written down

And all you hearts who love life realize now that to love is to love-

O sweetheart and okay
Here's hopin we'll all be away
It was great fun
But it was just one a
those tings

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.

We live to long, so long I will,

Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.

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

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

Somewhere in the vast jewelry of the Long Island night we walked, in wind and rain ...

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

... I went off with him for no reason.

I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.

Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!

No imaginary judgments of form, The clouds Butterfat

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

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

And nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

Oh what was the racket that backeted and smashed in raging might, to make this oil-puddle world?

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

I clearly saw the skeleton underneath
all this show of personality
what is left of a man
and all his pride but bones?

I dunno, maybe you're Goat.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life

It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.

I think my sudden love for this girl is a truer expression of myself than anything.

I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

For the next week that was all I heard - manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

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

Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??

I couldn't meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make?

Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)

The whole universe was crazy and cock-eyed and extremely strange.

Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.

Her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse.

There are worse things than being mad.

All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of hats, just like after work in any town anywhere.

Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream

I realised either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world.
And of course I was right.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

The beauty of things must be that they end.

Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise.

Ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you

The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.

There is nowhere to go but everywhere.

Oh, smell the people! yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. Ah, God! Life!

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read.

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

I see as much as doors'll allow, open or shut

Walking on water wasn't built in a day.

Artist or no-artist, I can't pass up a piece of fried chicken when I see one.

Rocks are space, and space is illusion.

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

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

The/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines ...