Jack Kerouac Quotes

"But then they danced down the street 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 - On the Road

"Who are all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me?" -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 - The Dharma Bums

"Pretty girls make graves." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

"Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'" -Jack Kerouac - Big Sur

"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

"Behind us lay the whole of America and everything I had previously known about life... We had finally found a magic land at the end of the road and we never had dreamed the extent of the magic." -Jack Kerouac On the Road

“...and 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

"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land." -Jack Kerouac

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”-Jack Kerouac

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.” -Jack Kerouac

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” -Jack Kerouac

“Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.” -Jack Kerouac

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” -Jack Kerouac

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.” -Jack Kerouac

“My witness is the empty sky.” -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.” -Jack Kerouac

“Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.” -Jack Kerouac

“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?” -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

"The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives." -Jack Kerouac

"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

“...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 is 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

"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

“All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.” -Jack Kerouac

“Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.” -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

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

“Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt." -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 John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'" - Jack Kerouac

“Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo 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 nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.” -Jack Kerouac

I'd rather be thin than famous" -Jack Kerouac

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" -Jack Kerouac - On the Road

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.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 - On the Road

"Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

". . . I'd thought in June . . . "When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and I'm alone I'll come face to face with God or Tathagatha and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence," but instead I'd come face to face with myself . . . face to face with Hateful Old Me." -Jack Kerouac

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty." -Jack Kerouac - On the Road

"And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time." -Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels

"...this poor haunted canyon which again gives me the willies as we walk under the bridge and come to those heartless breakers busting in on sand higher than earth and looking like the heartlessness of wisdom --Besides I suddenly notice as if for the first time the awful way the leaves of the canyon that have managed to be blown to the surf are all hesitantly advancing in gusts of wind then finally plunging into the surf, to be dispersed and belted and melted and taken off to sea --I turn around and notice how the wind is just harrying them off trees and into the sea, just hurrying them as it were to death --In my condition they look human trembling to that brink --Hastening, hastening ---In that awful huge roar blast of autumn Sur wind." -Jack Kerouac - Big Sur

"I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures. . . ." -Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

Kerouac Alley