Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

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
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.

Jack Kerouac
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.

Jack Kerouac
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

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
It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.

Jack Kerouac
What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want? She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

Jack Kerouac
I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim...

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
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

Jack Kerouac
And that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was

Jack Kerouac
I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.

Jack Kerouac
Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

Jack Kerouac
I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

Jack Kerouac
Do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.

Jack Kerouac
You can't fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name.

Jack Kerouac
Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

Jack Kerouac
The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

Jack Kerouac
-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity...

Jack Kerouac
If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

Jack Kerouac
It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneth inmense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? — sleep.

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
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
And never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.

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