Jack Kerouac Quotes (126 Quotes)

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, Fear life, but don't die you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

All of life is a foreign country.

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...

Swinging on delicate hinges the Autumn Leaf Almost off the stem.

His friend, novelist Jack Kerouac, was in the audience of about 150 at the performance. Scores of people stood around the darkened gallery straining to hear every word, ... Everyone was yelling, 'Go Go Go'

Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk- real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo 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 nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

Mainly I've been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As I'm writing this, the radio says there's a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now.

Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.

Accept loss forever.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everyone goes 'Awww'

My witness is the empty sky.

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.