Quotes from book
On the Road

Name: On the Road
Author: Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs , Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise.

“I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Life is life, and kind is kind”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“We agreed to love each other madly.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness…”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“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?”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

sleep."
Part Two, Ch. 8
On the Road (1957)

“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)

“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.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Three, Ch. 5
On the Road (1957)

“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.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Two, Ch. 4
On the Road (1957)

“I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Five
On the Road (1957)
Context: So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.