Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

At one point the driver said, "For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there." Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.

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

Jack Kerouac
One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.

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

Jack Kerouac
The only decent activity in the world [is] to pray for everyone, in solitude.

Jack Kerouac
I'm writing this book because we're all going to die — In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid...

Jack Kerouac
Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.' 'Where we going, man?' 'I don't know but we gotta go.

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
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

Jack Kerouac
Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.

Jack Kerouac
You are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration

Jack Kerouac
I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.

Jack Kerouac
Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.

Jack Kerouac
Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth.

Jack Kerouac
"What are you trying to do, Kerouac?" I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, "trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?" … "Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self … Take off your coat and crash wits." And I realized that all this Buddhism was a STRAIN at telling the untellable emptiness yet that nothing was truer, a perfect paradox.

Jack Kerouac
We are nothing. - Tomorrow we may be die. We are nothing. - You and me.

Jack Kerouac
All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.

Jack Kerouac
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow — hate's so easy compared.

Jack Kerouac
It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.

Jack Kerouac
Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Jack Kerouac
After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

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 realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

Jack Kerouac
The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.

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