Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums (1958)

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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
The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be "supervised."

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

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
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
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
Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

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
"Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy."

Jack Kerouac
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Jack Kerouac
It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.

Jack Kerouac
Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth.

Jack Kerouac
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

Jack Kerouac
Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.

Jack Kerouac
The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.

Jack Kerouac
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.

Jack Kerouac
I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.

Jack Kerouac