Jack Kerouac citations

Page 9

“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?”

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

“Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Believe in the holy contour of 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.”

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

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

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

“"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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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