Quotes & Sayings About Kerouac

My witness is the empty sky. — Jack Kerouac

A poet is a blind optimist.
The world is against him for
many reasons. But the
poet persists. He believes
that he is on the right track,
no matter what any of his
fellow men say. In his
eternal search for truth, the
poet is alone.
He tries to be timeless in a
society built on time. — Jack Kerouac

No imaginary judgments of form, The clouds Butterfat — Jack Kerouac

Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears. — Jack Kerouac

Everything is all right forever and forever and forever. — Jack Kerouac

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls. — Jack Kerouac

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal. — Jack Kerouac

He sure is a crazy one," she said. "Sure reminds me of my husband that run away. Just exactly the same guy. I sure hope my Mickey don't grow up that way, they all do now. — Jack Kerouac

Never mistake talking about writing for actual writing. — Jack Kerouac

If he can be call'd meek
who has no wishes
or hiding who needs never
be found
or scared who never
attacks
forgotten, who watches up
the night
If he can be called "he,"
who has no self
Writes "One is All"
On every wall. — Jack Kerouac

The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed! — Jack Kerouac

His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she was absolutely the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all our lives. She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds, living curls of them. She blushed and blushed ... 'Oh a girl like that scares me,' I said. 'I'd give up everything and throw myself on her mercy and if she didn't want me I'd just as simply go and throw myself off the edge of the world'. — Jack Kerouac

Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world. — Jack Kerouac

Fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt — Jack Kerouac

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]'s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language. — Sterling Lord

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. — William S. Burroughs

I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. — Jack Kerouac

Everything was everlastingly loose and responsive, it was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond emptyspace blue. "The mountains are mighty patient, Buddha-man," I said out loud, and took a drink. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

Dean's California
wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors. — Jack Kerouac

Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world. — Jack Kerouac

If you keep this up you'll both go crazy, but let me know what happens as you go along. — Jack Kerouac

At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth. — Jack Kerouac

If all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like lights? — Jack Kerouac

I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon. — Jack Kerouac

Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve. — William S. Burroughs

But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. — Jack Kerouac

The usual pronouncement that Truman Capote is a 'birdbrain.' Gore [Vidal] has finished a novel called Two Sisters in which he admits that he and Jack Kerouac went to bed together - or was that in an article? (Gore told me about so many articles he's written and talks he has given that my memory spins.) Anyhow, Gore now regrets that he didn't describe the act itself; how they got very drunk and Kerouac said, 'Why don't we take a shower?' and then tried to go down on him but did it very badly, and then they belly rubbed. Next day, Kerouac claimed he remembered nothing; but later, in a bar, yelled out, 'I've blown Gore Vidal! — Christopher Isherwood

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

I like it because its ugly — Jack Kerouac

Did the tea-time of your soul
Make you long for wilder days
Did you never let Jack Kerouac
Wash over you in waves? — Richard Thompson

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling. Ecstasy, even , I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. — Jack Kerouac

Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts. — Jack Kerouac

Buds in the snow
- the deadly fight
between two birds — Jack Kerouac

And I saw how everybody dies and nobody's going to care. I felt how it is to live just so you can die like a bull trapped in a screaming human ring. — Jack Kerouac

He had become completely mad in his movements; He seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying 'Am,' and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking — Jack Kerouac

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at. — David Bowie

The silence was an intense roar. — Jack Kerouac

all of life is a foreign country. — Jack Kerouac

God is an Indian giver who gives only occasionally. — Jack Kerouac

I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea. — Jack Kerouac

When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality. — Jack Kerouac

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. — Jack Kerouac

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

She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike. — Jack Kerouac

Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream — Jack Kerouac

We are nothing.
- Tomorrow we may be die.
We are nothing.
- You and me. — 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

They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. — Jack Kerouac

Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the East, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist. — Jack Kerouac

This is a thing which astonishes me no end, but affects you not. — Jack Kerouac

In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk
it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love
I saw Maggie's black hair in this night
In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery. — Jack Kerouac

stick at it like a benni addict — Jack Kerouac

Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God. — Jack Kerouac

Have been slowly making up my mind, seriously & quietly. Either I am loathsome to others, I have decided, or else I shall be a beacon of rich warm light, spreading good and plenty, making things prosper, being a cosmic architect, conquering the world and being respected, myself grinning surreptitiously. Either that, Sirs, or I shall be the most loathsome, useless, and parasitical (on myself) creature in the world. I shall be a denizen of the Underground, or a successful man of the world. There shall be no compromise!!! I mean it. — Jack Kerouac

I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved. — Joyce Johnson

Don't touch me, I'm full of snakes. — 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

You aren't ever going to be anything in this world unless you do what you want to do, when you want to do it
don't plan anything, just go out and do it. — Jack Kerouac

The actual materials are important ... A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern. — Allen Ginsberg

It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared. — Jack Kerouac

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre
the poems, the poems!
in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco. — Sarah Vowell

...but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man- 'twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in from of all our phantom unjuandiced eyes, friends. — Jack Kerouac

Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing. — K.M. Soehnlein

I didn't bring my peremptory tone to bear in regard to what you'd just said about the unnecessariness of sleep but only, only, mind you, because of the fact that I absolutely, simply, purely and without any whatevers have to sleep now, I mean, man, my eyes are closing, they're redhot, sore, tired, beat ... — Jack Kerouac

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities. — Jack Kerouac

I'm a fool, the new day rises on the world and on my foolish life: I'm a fool, I loved the blue dawns over racetracks and made a bet Ioway was sweet like its name, my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers, the wetness on the wire fence bugled me to belief, I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss - I am made of Cody, too - — Jack Kerouac

I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howling off in to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further. — Jack Kerouac

Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. — Jack Kerouac

Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do. — Jack Kerouac

Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me. — Jack Kerouac

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

Walking on water wasn't built in a day. — Jack Kerouac

It'll take you eternities to get rid of me,' she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I'll never get rid of her - I wanta be chased till eternity till I catch her. — Jack Kerouac

Ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you — Jack Kerouac

The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A. — Jack Kerouac

The fact was I had the vision ... I think everyone has ... what we lack is the method. — Jack Kerouac

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves. — Jack Kerouac

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! — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. — Jack Kerouac

One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time without biting and then went away. — Jack Kerouac

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac — Frank O'Hara

Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. — Jack Kerouac

But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility. — Jack Kerouac

I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. — Jack Kerouac

My life is a vast inconsequential epic. — Jack Kerouac

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

The more you study, the more you subsequently know; naturally, the more you know, the nearer you get to perfection as a journalist. — Jack Kerouac

We stopped in the unimaginable softness (293). — Jack Kerouac

In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age. — Jack Kerouac

In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach. — Jack Kerouac

Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy. — Jack Kerouac

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

My eyes were glued on life, and they were full of tears. — Jack Kerouac

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest.
If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. — Jack Kerouac