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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.
Jack Kerouac
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The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy.
Jack Kerouac
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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
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Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went.
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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.
Jack Kerouac
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While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light
Jack Kerouac
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I petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters.
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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.
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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.
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No matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.
Jack Kerouac
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Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
Jack Kerouac
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There is a blessedness surely to be believed,
and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.
Jack Kerouac
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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.'
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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
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I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.
Jack Kerouac
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He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence
Jack Kerouac
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Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.
Jack Kerouac
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Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days...
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You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.
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All the souls to explore! - It's not so necessary to love, really, as it is to settle something deep with all of those who really matter. Love and hate are the same things, differently sifted through personal... pride, or what have you... personal pride or even just personal-ness.
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Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.
Jack Kerouac
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Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Jack Kerouac
Creative Commons
Born:
March 12, 1922
Died:
October 21, 1969
(aged 47)
Bio:
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet.
Known for:
On The Road (1957)
The Dharma Bums (1958)
The Subterraneans (1958)
Big Sur (1962)
Desolation Angels (1965)
Most used words:
life
time
night
man
stars
beat
love
die
mad
god
mind
people
america
sleep
road
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