Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” Quotes (85 Quotes)

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.

Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.

I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.

It was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did.

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read.

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

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

Texas is undeniable...We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest.

We agreed to love each other madly.

He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.

The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view

We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night...

He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence

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.

Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.

The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

All around me were the noise of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john.

He wasn't drunk on liquor, just drunk on what he liked - crowds of people milling.

I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.

Life is life, and kind is kind

The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories.

We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.

All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.

Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.

What difference does it make after all?--anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.