Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

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

Jack Kerouac
And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

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

Jack Kerouac
All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester—but without hangovers.

Jack Kerouac
All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.

Jack Kerouac
What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.

Jack Kerouac
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts."

Jack Kerouac
Who is he that is not 'he' because of an idiot's ignorance?

Jack Kerouac
Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.

Jack Kerouac
We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

Jack Kerouac
I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

Jack Kerouac
Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

Jack Kerouac
I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

Jack Kerouac
God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.

Jack Kerouac
Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.

Jack Kerouac
Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?

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
We all must admit that everything is fine and there's no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we're not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.

Jack Kerouac
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Jack Kerouac
Nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.

Jack Kerouac
There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

Jack Kerouac
I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

Jack Kerouac
As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.

Jack Kerouac
Most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

Jack Kerouac
Anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just 'talents.' Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar.

Jack Kerouac
I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.

Jack Kerouac