Jack Kerouac Quotes (266 quotes, page 5)

“In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love , Pain , Fear , Madness

“Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness…”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Madness

“If only I had the magic self of babyhood when I remembered what it was like before I was born, I wouldnt worry about death now knowing both to be the same empty dream.”

Jack Kerouac book Tristessa

Tristessa (1960)

Death , Dreams

“Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul.”

Jack Kerouac

A misquote. It derives from an interview that journalist Bruce Cook conducted with Kerouac in 1968 and reported in his book The Beat Generation (1971). According to Cook, Kerouac explained to him his method of writing: "I'll just sit down and let it flow out of me ... It's the Holy Ghost that comes through you. You don't have to be a Catholic to know what I mean, and you don't have to be a Catholic for the Holy Ghost to speak through you." Source of misquote.

Art , Soul

“So long and take it easy, because if you start taking things seriously, it is the end of you.”

Jack Kerouac

Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (1999)

“Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling at this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won't do−just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that's what I'll do-.”

Jack Kerouac book The Subterraneans

Source: The Subterraneans (1958), Chapter One

Truth , Confidence , Intelligence , Nature

“It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneth inmense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for?”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

sleep."
Part Two, Ch. 8
On the Road (1957)

Sadness , Sleep

“Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums (1958)

World , Mountain , Understanding

“Members of the generation that came of age after World War II-Korean War who join in a relaxation of social and sexual tensions, and who espouse anti-regimentation, mystic-disaffiliation, and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of cold-war disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac.”

Jack Kerouac book Beat Generation

Definition of "Beat Generation" offered to Random House publishers in 1959, after being asked him if there was anything he'd like to add to the definition they were preparing for the American College Dictionary: "Certain members of the generation that came of age after World War II who affect detachment from moral and social forms and responsibilities, supposedly the result of disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac." The Random House definition eventually published read: "members of the generation that came of age after World War II who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espoused forms of mysticism and the relaxation of social and sexual inhibitions."

War , Age , World

“There's your Karma ripe as peaches.”

Jack Kerouac book Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels (1965)

“Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest.”

Jack Kerouac

Not a Kerouac quote, but by the Indian spiritual leader, Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007).
Misattributed

Happy , Love , Forgiveness , Happiness

“Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.”

Jack Kerouac

Some of the Dharma (1997)

Literature

“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 and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness…”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums (1958)

World , School , Thinking , Time

“John Clellon Holmes … and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!”

Jack Kerouac book Beat Generation

"The Origins of the Beat Generation" in Playboy (June 1959), explaining the origins of the term the "Beat Generation".

Thinking

“The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, in anguish, nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some), but I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's an innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectal propaganda and Comintern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar, assumes that the truth-teller is lying too.”

Jack Kerouac book Vanity of Duluoz

Vanity of Duluoz (1968)

Truth , Lie , World , Lying

“All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.”

Jack Kerouac book Visions of Gerard

Visions of Gerard (1963)

“One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they've been doing they weren't sure it was right — lambies all over the world.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Lonesome Traveler (1960)

People , World , Understanding , Night

“You can't fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name.”

Jack Kerouac

"After Me, The Deluge" in The Chicago Tribune (28 September 1969)

Change , Fight

“So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part One, Ch. 3
On the Road (1957)

World , Girl , Past

“But O Sarina come with me to my bed of woes, let me love you gently in the night, long time, we got all night, till dawn, till Juliet's rising sun and Romeo's vial sink, till I have slaked my thirst of Samsara at your portal rosy petal lips and left saviour juice in your rosy flesh garden to melt and dry and ululate another baby for the void, come sweet Sarina in my naughty arms, be dirty in my clean milk, and I'll detest the defecate I leave in your milky empowered cyst-and-vulva chamber, your cloacan clara file-hool through which slowly drool the hall-gyzm, to castles in your hassel flesh and I'll protect you trembling thighs against my heart and kiss your lips and cheeks and Lair and love you everywhere and that'll be that…”

Jack Kerouac book Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels (1965)

Love , Kiss , Time , Sun

“(…) who is he that is not 'he' because of an idiot's ignorance?”

Jack Kerouac book Vanity of Duluoz

Vanity of Duluoz (1968)

“Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”

Jack Kerouac

Visions Of Cody (1973) and The Beginning Of Bop (1959)

“The mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the West, spine heights at the world's end, coast of blue Pacific starry night — nobone halfbanana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onwards, illuminate. — The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass — orangebutted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher the level of the world, low and flat: the charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route.”

Jack Kerouac book Visions of Cody

Visions of Cody (1960)

World , Cars , Home , Star

“Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?”

Jack Kerouac

"The Origins of the Beat Generation" in Playboy (June 1959)

God , Universe , Personality , Sea

“At one point the driver said, "For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there." Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Three, Ch. 5
On the Road (1957)

God , Angels , Cars , Soul

“A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.”

Jack Kerouac

Some of the Dharma (1997)

Passion , Heart

“I could give you a list a mile long of the homosexuals in the arts but there's no point in making a big tzimis about a relatively harmless and cool state of affairs — Each man to his own tastes.”

Jack Kerouac book Desolation Angels

Desolation Angels (1965)

Art

“Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.”

Jack Kerouac

Not a Kerouac quote, but part of the text from a publicity campaign for the Beat Museum, San Francisco, composed by the advertising agency Gyro: http://paulacw.com/The-Beat-Museum
Misattributed

Life

“Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Big Sur (1962)

Men , Drink , Thinking , Sister

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

Jack Kerouac

Pomes All Sizes (1992)

Men

“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 bee considered 'dangerous' but set in place in their compartmental understandings.”

Jack Kerouac

This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed

Understanding , Bee

“Mankind is like dogs, not gods — as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you — but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.”

Jack Kerouac

Some of the Dharma (1997)

God , Dogs , Madness

“It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”

Jack Kerouac

This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed

Love , Understanding , Time , Help

“A man needs truth like a machine needs oil.”

Jack Kerouac

Often attributed to Kerouac's novel Big Sur, the quote cannot be found in that book, nor in any of Kerouac's other published works. It is, in fact, a quote by the Kerouac character in the movie of Big Sur (2013) and therefore composed by the screenplay writer Michael Polish, rather than by Jack Kerouac.
Misattributed

Truth

“Believe in the holy contour of life”

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)

Life

“The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Two, Ch. 4
On the Road (1957)

Death , Hate

“All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.”

Jack Kerouac

Visions Of Cody (1973)

Smile

“As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.”

Jack Kerouac

Book of Blues (1995)

Perfection

“It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.”

Jack Kerouac

The New York Journal-American (8 Dec 1960)

“"What are you trying to do, Kerouac?" I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, "trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?" … "Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self … Take off your coat and crash wits." And I realized that all this Buddhism was a STRAIN at telling the untellable emptiness yet that nothing was truer, a perfect paradox.”

Jack Kerouac

Meditation in the Woods (1958)

Fools , Jerk , Reality , Perfection

“The tree looks like a dog, barking at heaven.”

Jack Kerouac

Book of Haikus (2003)

Dogs , Tree

“(...) comes under the influence of old French Fairies who accuse him of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth”

Jack Kerouac book Scattered Poems

Scattered Poems (1971)

“What are you trying to do, Kerouac? I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?... Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self ... Take off your coat and crash wits.”

Jack Kerouac

And I realized that all this Buddhism was a STRAIN at telling the untellable emptiness yet that nothing was truer, a perfect paradox.

Meditation in the Woods (1958)

Night , Fools , Self-confidence , Reality

“I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.”

Jack Kerouac

"The Origins of the Beat Generation" in Playboy (June 1959)

Childhood , People

“Defy the law! Write the heartbroken poetry of the World!”

Jack Kerouac

This appears not to be a Kerouac quote. It has not been found in any of Kerouac's published work.
Misattributed

Law , World