Jack Kerouac Quotes (126 Quotes)

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.

And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good arm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.

Here I was at the end of America...no more land...and nowhere was nowhere to go but back

I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

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

The road must eventually lead to the whole world.

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets Id roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the

What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...

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.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea, said Japhy. Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.

We're really all of us bottomly broke. I haven't had time to work in weeks.

The summer chair rocking by itself In the blizzard.

The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great that I thought I was in a dream.