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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
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As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.
Jack Kerouac
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One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
Jack Kerouac
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But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.
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The only decent activity in the world [is] to pray for everyone, in solitude.
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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...
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Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.' 'Where we going, man?' 'I don't know but we gotta go.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration
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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.
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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.
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Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth.
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"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.
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We are nothing. - Tomorrow we may be die. We are nothing. - You and me.
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All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.
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It always makes me proud to love the world somehow — hate's so easy compared.
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It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.
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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.
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After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.
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But I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.
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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.
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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.
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What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.
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Quote of the day
In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
Thomas De Quincey
Jack Kerouac
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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:
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,
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,
love
,
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,
mad
,
god
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mind
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people
,
america
,
sleep
,
road
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