Jack Kerouac - On The Road (1957)

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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
It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneth inmense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? — sleep.

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
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

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
Here I was at the end of America...no more land...and nowhere was nowhere to go but back

Jack Kerouac
Galatea was a serious girl. she was pale and looked like tears all over. big ed passed his hand through his hair and said hello. she looked at him steadily. "where have you been? why did you do this to me?" and she gave dean a dirty look; she knew the score. dean paid absolutely no attention; what he wanted now was food; he asked jane if there was anything. the confusion began right there.

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
Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

Jack Kerouac
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

Jack Kerouac
And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.

Jack Kerouac
In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.

Jack Kerouac
We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

Jack Kerouac
The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view.

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
I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

Jack Kerouac
For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.

Jack Kerouac
What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

Jack Kerouac
A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

Jack Kerouac
The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories.

Jack Kerouac
The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

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

Jack Kerouac
Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.

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

Jack Kerouac
I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.

Jack Kerouac
The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.

Jack Kerouac
Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

Jack Kerouac
We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night...

Jack Kerouac
I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.

Jack Kerouac