Jack Kerouac Quotes

The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.

~ Jack Kerouac

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

~ Jack Kerouac

...the restaurant itself is weird especially because of a big raunch mad thicklipped sloppy young Fillipino woman sitting alone at the end of the restaurant gobbling up her food obscenely and looking at us insolently as tho to say Fuck you, I eat the way I like splashing gravy everywhere (p. 156)

~ Jack Kerouac

Whatever anyone does,/ anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror)

~ Jack Kerouac

I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.

~ Jack Kerouac

...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

~ Jack Kerouac

You boys going to get somewhere, or just going? We didn't understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

~ Jack Kerouac

I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true…it’s like finding a river of gold when you haven’t even got a cup to save a cupful…you’ve but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness.

~ Jack Kerouac

Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - 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 in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

~ Jack Kerouac

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.

~ Jack Kerouac

I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’spractically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, ofcourse.

~ Jack Kerouac

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.

~ Jack Kerouac

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

~ Jack Kerouac

Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!

~ Jack Kerouac

and rain will fall on our eaves.

~ Jack Kerouac

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.

~ Jack Kerouac

I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...)I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar......like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when they're only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...

~ Jack Kerouac

And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.

~ Jack Kerouac

You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse

~ Jack Kerouac

I clearly saw the skeleton underneathall this show of personalitywhat is left of a manand all his pride but bones?

~ Jack Kerouac

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

~ Jack Kerouac

I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.

~ Jack Kerouac

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

~ Jack Kerouac

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

~ Jack Kerouac

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. IN the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as 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.

~ Jack Kerouac

The eyes of hope looking over the flare of the hood into the maw with its white line feeding in straight as an arrow, the lighting of fresh cigarettes, the buckling to lean forward to the next adventure something that's been going on in America ever since the covered wagons clocked the deserts in three months flat—

~ Jack Kerouac

Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! - and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! - high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world.

~ Jack Kerouac

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say to 'David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha' though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes.

~ Jack Kerouac

At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.

~ Jack Kerouac

...the stars are fixed in rooftops like ink.

~ Jack Kerouac

I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.

~ Jack Kerouac

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.

~ Jack Kerouac

I know everything's alright but I want proof and the Buddhas and the Virgin Marys are there reminding me of the solemn pledge of faith in this harsh and stupid earth where we rage our so-called lives in a sea of worry, meat for Chicagos of Graves - right this minute my very father and my very brother lie side by side in mud in the North and I'm supposed to be smarter than they are - being quick I am dead.

~ Jack Kerouac

...do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.

~ Jack Kerouac

I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours

~ Jack Kerouac

One look at the officials in the American Consulate where we went for dreary paper routines was enough to make you realize what was wrong with American 'diplomacy' throughout the Fellaheen world: - stiff offcious squares with contempt even for their own Americans who happened not to wear neckties, as tho a necktie or whatever it stands for meant anything to the hungry Berbers who came into Tangiers every Saturday morning on meek asses, like Christ, carrying baskets of pitiful fruit or dates, and returned at dusk to silhouetted parades along the hill by the railroad track. The railroad track where barefooted prophets still walked and taught the Koran to children along the way. Why didn't the American consul ever walk into the urchin hall where Mohammed Maye sat smoking? or squat in behind empty buildings with old Arabs who talked with their hands? or any thing? Instead it's all private limousines, hotel restaurants, parties in the suburbs, an endless phoney rejection in the name of 'democracy' of all that's pith and moment of every land.

~ Jack Kerouac

Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led to the Fall? Souls in Heaven said We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it's great!—Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how.

~ Jack Kerouac

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.

~ Jack Kerouac

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

~ Jack Kerouac

Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)

~ Jack Kerouac