“Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul.”
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.
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Jack Kerouac 266
American writer 1922–1969Related quotes
Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 11 (p. 121)
The Fourteenth Revelation, Chapter 41
Source: Revelations of Divine Love
Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)
Context: All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit.
Sermon V : The Self-Communication of God
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)
Book I : The Beginnings, Ch. V : The Baptism Of The Penguins
Penguin Island (1908)
Context: Thinking that what he saw were men living under the natural law, and that the Lord had sent him to teach them the Divine law, he preached the gospel to them.
Mounted on a lofty stone in the midst of the wild circus:
"Inhabitants of this island," said he, "although you be of small stature, you look less like a band of fishermen and mariners than like the senate of a judicious republic. By your gravity, your silence, your tranquil deportment, you form on this wild rock an assembly comparable to the Conscript Fathers at Rome deliberating in the temple of Victory, or rather, to the philosophers of Athens disputing on the benches of the Areopagus. Doubtless you possess neither their science nor their genius, but perhaps in the sight of God you are their superiors. I believe that you are simple and good. As I went round your island I saw no image of murder, no sign of carnage, no enemies' heads or scalps hung from a lofty pole or nailed to the doors of your villages. You appear to me to have no arts and not to work in metals. But your hearts are pure and your hands are innocent, and the truth will easily enter into your souls."
Now what he had taken for men of small stature but of grave bearing were penguins whom the spring had gathered together, and who were ranged in couples on the natural steps of the rock, erect in the majesty of their large white bellies. From moment to moment they moved their winglets like arms, and uttered peaceful cries. They did not fear men, for they did not know them, and had never received any harm from them; and there was in the monk a certain gentleness that reassured the most timid animals and that pleased these penguins extremely.