Jack Kerouac citations

Page 8

“N'utilisez pas le téléphone. Les gens ne sont jamais prêts à y répondre. Utilisez la poésie.”

“Comme toujours, j’étais surpris de voir combien c’était facile de partir et combien réconfortante en était la sensation. Le monde était soudainement riche de possibilités.”

“Bientôt, je trouverai les bons mots, ils seront très simples.”

“Les grands exploits ne sont pas accomplis par ceux qui succombent aux tendances, à la mode et suivent les opinions populaires.”

“Toute ma vie misérable défilait devant mes yeux fatigués, et j'ai réalisé que quoi que l'on fasse, ce sera toujours une perte de temps, alors autant devenir fou.”

“et je trainais derrière eux comme je l’ai fait toute ma vie derrière les gens qui m’intéressent”

“Nous étions perchés sur le toit de l´Amérique, et ne savions que gueuler - pour atteindre, qui sait? l´autre cóté de la nuit, l´Est, au-delá des plaines, ou un vieillard chenu était peut-ětre en route vers nous, porteur de la Parole, sur le point d´arriver pour nous faire taire.”

“Il pouvait à peine placer un mot tellement ça l'excitait de vivre.”

“La seule chose après laquelle nous languissons durant notre existence, qui nous fait soupirer et gémir et souffrir toutes sortes de doucereuses nausées, c'est le souvenir de quelque félicité perdue que l'on a sans doute éprouvée dans le sein maternel et qui ne saurait se reproduire (mais nous nous refusons à l'admettre) que dans la mort. Mais qui souhaite mourir?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of 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.”

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

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

“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-.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“There's your Karma ripe as peaches.”

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

“Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.”

“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…”

“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!”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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