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Jack Kerouac Quotes
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Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet of French-Canadian ancestry.He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking. Since his death, Kerouac's literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, including The Town and the City, On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, The Sea Is My Brother, Satori In Paris, and Big Sur. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. March 1922 – 21. October 1969
Jack Kerouac photo
Jack Kerouac: 266 quotes67 likes

Jack Kerouac Quotes

“I felt free and therefore I was free.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“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 book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are still pretty glorious.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Variant: Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
Source: The Dharma Bums

“Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“It's only through form that we can realize emptiness”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“… do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Bein Crazy
is the least of my worries.”

Jack Kerouac

Source: Book of Blues

“It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Lonesome Traveler (1960)
Context: No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

“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….”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ‘cause now is the time and we all know time!”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.”

Jack Kerouac

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

Jack Kerouac

Source: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.”

Jack Kerouac

“We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night…”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours”

Jack Kerouac book Tristessa

Source: Tristessa

“Ray, what you got to do is go climb a mountain…”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“and I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow - And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too.
A long way to go.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

“When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“To the children and the innocent it's all the same.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.”

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 book Lonesome Traveler

Variant: I came to a point where I needed solitude and 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.
Source: Lonesome Traveler

“She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.”

Jack Kerouac book Maggie Cassidy

Source: Maggie Cassidy

“An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else…”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

“don't stop to think of the words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better-and let your mind off yourself in this work.”

Jack Kerouac

Source: Dr Sax

“February dawn -- frost
on the path
Where I paced all winter.”

Jack Kerouac Book of Haikus

Source: Book of Haikus

“Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Some's bastards, some's ain't.
That's the score.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Accept loss forever”

Jack Kerouac

"Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials" in a letter to Arabelle Porter (28 May 1955); published in Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-1956 (1995) and in a letter to Don Allen (1958); published in Heaven & Other Poems (1977)
Variant: Accept loss forever

“The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L. A.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.”

Jack Kerouac book Book of Sketches

Source: Book of Sketches

“They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt”

Jack Kerouac

“It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Source: Lonesome Traveler