Jack Kerouac Quotes

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“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Bein Crazy
is the least of my worries.”

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

“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.”

“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….”

“That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.”

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.”

“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…”

“The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”

“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”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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”

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

“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.”