Jack Kerouac Quotes

“Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest.
If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“I have just discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feelings.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“Everything Jack says is to be taken with considerable reserve.”
― William Burroughs

“I'm afraid that you'll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you'll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled.
Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby -
Talk about yr hot peace.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.”
― Jack Kerouac

“And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches

“Non avevo niente da offrire a nessuno tranne la mia confusione.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“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

“Y es así como, una vez obtenida la esencia de su amor, ahora erijo grandes construcciones verbales, y de ese modo en realidad lo traiciono, repitiendo calumnias como quien tiende las sábanas sucias al mundo; y las suyas, las nuestras, durante los dos meses de nuestro amor (así lo creí) sólo fueron lavadas una vez, porque ella era una subterránea solitaria que se pasaba los días abstraída y decidida a llevarlas al lavadero, pero de pronto se descubre que ya es casi de noche y demasiado tarde, y las sábanas ya están grises, hermosas para mí porque así son más suaves.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans

“I've realized something utterly strange and yet common, I think I've experienced the deep turning about. At present I am completely happy and feel completely free, I love everybody and intend to go on doing so, I know that I am an imaginary blossom and so it my literary life and my literary accomplishments are so many useless imaginary blossoms. Reality isn't images. But I do things anyhow because I am free from self, free from delusion, free from anger, I love everyone equally, as equally empty and equally coming Buddhas.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“Feeling close to Jack Kerouac as I am back to traveling again. The road and the sky feel full of life.

Vis ta vie!”
― Avijeet Das

“We’ve all got a dozen or so friends, haven’t we? And when we’re drunk we philosophise well into the night on an array of subjects ranging from what happened before the Big Bang to who would win a fight between a vampire and zombie, to what’s the most compromising position to be caught in, but we’re hardly going to be extolled in 60 or 70 years’ time as the Heat Generation or the Cheat Generation or the Street Generation, are we?

The Tweet Generation, maybe, but that’s about all.

So what was it about these few guys? Well, they wrote about what they did, and what they did was quite revolutionary back then. They went On the Road, and it was Jack Kerouac’s book that turned the tide.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“There ain’t no such thing as lumberjack, that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call ‘em loggers.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Art there, Lord Star? - Diminished is the drizzle that broke my calm.”
― Jack Kerouac, Tristessa

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

“Cuanto más te acercas a la auténtica materia, a la piedra y al aire y al fuego y a la madera, muchacho, el mundo resulta más espiritual. Toda esa gente que se considera materialista a ultranza no sabe nada de eso. Se consideran gente práctica y tienen la cabeza llena de ideas y nociones confusas. -Levantó la mano-. Escucha esa ardilla.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Aquí me tienes matándome con este trasto yendo y viniendo de Ohio a Los Angeles y gano más de lo que tú has tenido en toda tu vida de vagabundo, pero eres el único que disfruta la vida. Y no sólo eso, además lo haces sin trabajar ni necesitar un montón de dinero. Vamos a ver, ¿quién es más listo, tú o yo?”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“¿no te das cuenta de que es un privilegio regalar cosas a los demás? -Y lo hacía de un modo muy agradable. No había nada de navideño ni de ostentoso, sino algo casi triste, y en ocasiones sus regalos eran cosas viejas que tenían el encanto de lo útil y lo melancólico.”
― Jack Kerouac

“No hay sensación mejor en el mundo que lavarse la cara en el agua fría una mañana en la montaña.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Las sendas son así: uno se siente flotar en el paraíso shakespeariano de Arden y cree que va a ver ninfas y pastores tocando el camarillo, cuando de repente se encuentra bajo un sol abrasador en un infierno de polvo y espinos y ortigas..., exactamente igual que la vida.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Kenneth Wood was sitting on the windowsill looking at him sardonically, yet with that sadness that always happened when they looked at each other - as though there was something they knew that nobody else knew, a crazy sorrowful knowledge of themselves in the middle of the pitiable world.”
― jack kerouac, The Town and the City

“On the Road" by Jack Kerouac is a favorite book that I love reading. I spend most times alone.”
― Avijeet Das, Why the Silhouette?

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

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Feeling close to Jack Kerouac as I am back to traveling again. The road and the sky feel full of life.

Vis ta vie!”
― Avijeet Das

“Like so many American tales, On the Road is about escape, about lighting out for the perpetually receding territory ahead.”
― William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady