Jack Kerouac: Quotes about life
Jack Kerouac was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.“Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.”
"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). Sometimes misquoted as "Be in love with your life every minute of it."
Variant: Be in love with your life every detail of it
Source: On the Road: The Original Scroll
The Town and the City (1950)
Context: He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
The Dharma Bums (1958)
Source: On the Road
“Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.”
Source: Selected Letters, 1940-1956
“Maybe that's what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.”
Letter to Alan Harrington (23 April 1949) published in Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956 (1996)
Source: Selected Letters, 1940-1956
Journal entry (November 1951) as published in the Kerouac ROMnibus http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/resguide/resources/j100.html
“My eyes were glued on life
and they were full of tears.”
Source: Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
Source: On the Road: the Original Scroll
Source: On the Road: the Original Scroll
“All of life is a foreign country.”
Letter to John Clellon Holmes (24 June 1949), published in The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook (1987) edited by Arthur Knight and Kit Knight, page 93.