Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Jack Kerouac
I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?

Jack Kerouac
Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

Jack Kerouac
Who doesn't feel studious when he doesn't have a girl with a Riviera suntan?

Jack Kerouac
I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.

Jack Kerouac
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

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
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
It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

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

Jack Kerouac
But I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.

Jack Kerouac
I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.

Jack Kerouac
I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

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
The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.

Jack Kerouac
They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there — and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see.

Jack Kerouac
LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

Jack Kerouac
But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.

Jack Kerouac
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.

Jack Kerouac
Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.

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

Jack Kerouac
The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

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

Jack Kerouac