Jack Kerouac: Quotes about the world

Jack Kerouac was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on world.

Jack Kerouac: 532 quotes67 likes

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

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“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.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“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.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“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

“… 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

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

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“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

“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)

“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."

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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

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