Quotes from book
The Dharma Bums
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s.
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
The Dharma Bums (1958)
“Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.”
Some of the Dharma (1997)
Source: Sometimes paraphrased as "One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple" or "Someday I will find the right words … ", and sometimes misattributed to The Dharma Bums rather than to Some of the Dharma.
“Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are still pretty glorious.”
Variant: Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
Source: The Dharma Bums
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all.”
Source: The Dharma Bums (1958)
Context: I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.
“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
Source: The Dharma Bums
“Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain.”
Source: The Dharma Bums
