Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Jack Kerouac

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

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

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

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

Jack Kerouac

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

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

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

Jack Kerouac

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

But that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too

Jack Kerouac

Dean's California—wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

Jack Kerouac

Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...

Jack Kerouac

It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

Jack Kerouac

A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street...

Jack Kerouac

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

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 just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.

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

I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!

Jack Kerouac

Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world

Jack Kerouac

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?

Jack Kerouac

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

Jack Kerouac

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Aww!

Jack Kerouac

In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.

Jack Kerouac

As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk

Jack Kerouac

"What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.

Jack Kerouac

Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.

Jack Kerouac