Jack Kerouac Quotes

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“If you own a rug you own too much.”

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

“I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.”

“No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

“My shoes are clean from walking in the rain.”

“Nothing ever happened - Not even this”

“The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.”

“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.”

“.. and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was”

“I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.”

“I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion”

“Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.”

“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?”

“cliches are truisms and all truisms are true”

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

“I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.”

“Life is life, and kind is kind”

“ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you”

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”

“I think it's a lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.”

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

“i wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.”

“It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.”

“Something that you feel will find its own form.”

“Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”

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

“You guys are going somewhere or just going?”

“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.”

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

“I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.”

“Write in recollection and amazement for yourself”

“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?”

“Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

“Down in Denver, all I did was die.”

“all day long
wearing a hat
that wasn't on my head”

“Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

“And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”

“The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.”

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all.”

“The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”

“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.”

“We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.”

“… 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.”

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

“It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.”

“All of life is a foreign country.”

“I'd rather be thin than famous
but I'm fat
paste that in your broadway show”

“I felt free and therefore I was free.”