Jack Kerouac quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

  • 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.

  • Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.

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

  • John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'

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

  • Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach....

  • Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

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

  • All of life is a foreign country.

  • Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.

  • Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.

  • 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.

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

  • The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

  • One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -

  • Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

  • I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

  • The beat generation (coined in Playboy)

  • They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

  • Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate.

  • He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being."

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

  • Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind [it] is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

  • My witness is the empty sky.

  • Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country....

  • I have the right ideas, but my words are too... complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

  • I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.

  • Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.

  • 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..."

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

  • The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me

  • Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.

  • 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.

  • Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.

  • Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.

  • ...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse.

  • What is that 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.

  • Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

  • I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

  • I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

  • Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

  • And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.

  • While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light

  • Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?

  • At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

  • One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

  • a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.

  • I petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters.

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

  • Ah, 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.

  • The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.

  • 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.

  • 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 yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

  • It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.

  • I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.

  • A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street...

  • I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a Fudge Sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily - all kinds of stuff that American brands 'shiftless.'

  • She talks with a broken heart - Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it's almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn't even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess...

  • because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...

  • I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

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

  • It's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies

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

  • 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

  • And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

  • The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be "supervised."

  • Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.

  • I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I'll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone's lapel and make them confess to me and to all.

  • My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

  • and the stars were icicles of mockery

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

  • The only truth is music.

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

  • If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

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

  • The secret of this kind of climbing, is like Zen. Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you don't hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like zen.~ Japhy

  • He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.

  • Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.

  • And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.

  • Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.

  • But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

  • The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

  • Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

  • What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?

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

  • Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I'll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already.

  • But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do

  • There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

  • Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'... But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.' There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!

  • Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

  • 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.

  • Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.

  • Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.

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

  • To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.

  • I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

  • listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot

  • I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.

  • Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.

  • And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once.

  • Terplash, & what difference make! One little white spark of light! Hair woven hands Penelope seaboat smeller Is Virgin you trying to fathom me Tiresome old sea, aint you sick & tired of all of this merde? this incessant boom boom & sand walk

  • But that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too

  • I left with my canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the fifty dollars in my pocket.

  • For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly reminding me tonpay attention to his goodness and advice.

  • Diamond Sutra says, 'Make no formed conceptions about the realness of existence nor about the unrealness of existence, or words like that. Handcuffs will get soft and billy clubs will topple over, let's go on being free anyhow.

  • And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.

  • E anche se aveva problemi di lavoro e una storia infelice con una donna dalla lingua lunga, almeno aveva imparato a ridere meglio di chiunque altro al mondo.

  • Is Virgin you trying to fathom me

  • 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 golden eternity is { }

  • ..history is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade...

  • Quella strada del passato si srotolava confusamente di fianco a noi come se la tazza della vita si fosse rovesciata e ogni cosa fosse impazzita.

  • Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last.

  • A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.

  • ...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100.

  • But there's no joy at all, people say "Oh well he's drunk and happy let him sleep it off"--The poor drunkard is *crying*--He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he's crying for help. (p.111)

  • ...in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was "The pathway to wisdom lies through excess" (p. 113)

  • Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

  • After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share