Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

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

Jack Kerouac
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.

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

Jack Kerouac
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, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'

Jack Kerouac
Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

Jack Kerouac
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 like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Aww!

Jack Kerouac
But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearning of human souls... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks!... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind'll blow it back.

Jack Kerouac
We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

Jack Kerouac
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 and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...

Jack Kerouac
I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!

Jack Kerouac
Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.

Jack Kerouac
I'm stuck struggling in the cold water, and all I can do is grieve, grieve, in the hoar necessitous horror of the morning, bitterly I hate myself, bitterly it's too late yet while I feel better I still feel ephemeral and unreal and unable to straighten my thoughts or even really grieve, in fact I feel too stupid to be really bitter, in short I don't know what I'm doing and I'm being told what to do...

Jack Kerouac
"What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

Jack Kerouac
One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they've been doing they weren't sure it was right — lambies all over the world.

Jack Kerouac
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.

Jack Kerouac
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?

Jack Kerouac
A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.

Jack Kerouac
How I wished I'd have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot - an epic in itself. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

Jack Kerouac
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
I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren't people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.

Jack Kerouac