Jack Kerouac - Life Quotes

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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 must change my life, now, I have reached 21 and I am indeed earnest about all things. This does not mean I will cease my debauching.

Jack Kerouac

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

Jack Kerouac

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

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

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

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

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

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

His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.

Jack Kerouac

And that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was

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

I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.

Jack Kerouac

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

Jack Kerouac

The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don't hold back, don't analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.

Jack Kerouac

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Jack Kerouac

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?

Jack Kerouac

I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.

Jack Kerouac

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

Jack Kerouac

Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH…

Jack Kerouac

They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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, 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 "Awww!"

Jack Kerouac

The tale that's told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that's told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.

Jack Kerouac

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Jack Kerouac

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.

Jack Kerouac

I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours

Jack Kerouac