Jack Kerouac - Beat Quotes

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I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"… the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.

Jack Kerouac
But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearning of human souls... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks!... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind'll blow it back.

Jack Kerouac
They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

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
John Clellon Holmes … and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'

Jack Kerouac