Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.

Jack Kerouac

I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

Jack Kerouac

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

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

I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

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

They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.

Jack Kerouac

That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.

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

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

And then we'll all go off to sweet life, 'cause now is the time and we all know time!

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

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Jack Kerouac

Everything is going to the beat — It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...

Jack Kerouac