Jack Kerouac Quotes

251 Sourced Quotes

Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind." But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off.

Jack Kerouac

What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?

Jack Kerouac

The requirements for prose and verse are the same, i.e. blow – What a man most wishes to hide, revise, and unsay, is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for. Every doctor knows, every Prophet knows the convulsion of truth.

Jack Kerouac

Think what a great world revolution will take place when... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country....

Jack Kerouac

In prose you make the paragraph. Every paragraph is a poem.

Jack Kerouac

I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.

Jack Kerouac

I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely phsycial realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came

Jack Kerouac

How I wished I'd have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot - an epic in itself. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958)

Jack Kerouac

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

Jack Kerouac

And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once.

Jack Kerouac

Something great is about to happen to me: I'm about to love somebody very much.

Jack Kerouac

Notice how he will come to manhood with his own particular soul bespeaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyes surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls.

Jack Kerouac

And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.

Jack Kerouac

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

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

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death.

Jack Kerouac

The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy.

Jack Kerouac

The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.

Jack Kerouac

Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went.

Jack Kerouac

The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.

Jack Kerouac

While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light

Jack Kerouac

I petted the dogs who didn't argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They're wiser than their masters.

Jack Kerouac

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

Jack Kerouac

Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

Jack Kerouac

No matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.

Jack Kerouac

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

Jack Kerouac

There is a blessedness surely to be believed,
and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.

Jack Kerouac

I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a Fudge Sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily - all kinds of stuff that American brands 'shiftless.'

Jack Kerouac

I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren't people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.

Jack Kerouac

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

Jack Kerouac