Out to get the best Jack Kerouac quotes and sayings? Let’s help you out buddy.
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts.
He is the author of the novel, On the road.
Jack Kerouac’s quotes are quite broad since they focus on different aspects of life.
Specifically, these quotes center on love, life, mountain, America, California, writing, friends, music, Jazz, failure, and passion.
These sayings are also targeted at adventure, goodbye, travel, adventure, freedom, compassion, kindness, happiness, and so much more.
Best Jack Kerouac Quotes
The best Jack Kerouac quotes are:
“What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?”
― 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, On the Road
“It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate’s so easy compared.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“beautiful insane
in the rain”
― Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
“I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”
― Jack Kerouac
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’
‘Where we going, man?’
‘I don’t know but we gotta go.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Life must be rich and full of loving–it’s no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.”
― Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940-1956
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“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”
― Jack Kerouac
“On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars – Something good will come out of all things yet – And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can’t hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that’s all.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Houses are full of things that gather dust”
― Jack Kerouac
“And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.”
― Kerouac, Jack
“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Pain or love or danger makes you real again….”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.”
― 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, and 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 the 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.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Something good will come of all things yet”
― Jack Kerouac
“They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll
“This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll
“We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.”
― Jack Kerouac
“I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“Don’t touch me, I’m full of snakes.”
― 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, The Dharma Bums
“We agreed to love each other madly.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“[…]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
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll
“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
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“The only truth is music.”
― 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.”
“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
― 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, On the Road: The Original Scroll
“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, On the Road
“The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream”
― Jack Kerouac
“Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― 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, On the Road
“I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Will you love me in December as you do in May?”
― Jack Kerouac
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. 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, On the Road
“It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,’ she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her – I wanna be chased till eternity till I catch her.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”
― Jack Kerouac
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“colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class 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 to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”
― Jack Kerouac, “The Dharma Bums”, The Dharma Bums
“Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.”
― jack kerouac
“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954
“All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll
“And when the fog’s over and the stars and the moon come out at night it’ll be a beautiful sight.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“There are worse things than being mad.”
― 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, The Subterraneans
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“he saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end.”
― Jack Kerouac
“My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I’m a wretch. But I love, love.”
― Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris & Pic
“…we all must admit that everything is fine and there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“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.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Pretty girls make graves”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Listen closely… the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.”
― Jack Kerouac
“When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
“Be in love with your life, every detail of it.”
― Jack Kerouac
“As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, “Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
“Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??”
― 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. But who wants to die?”
― Jack Kerouac
“The road must eventually lead to the whole world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Besides which, she would never understand me because 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, On the Road
“I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll
“Love is all.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize ‘The stars are words’ and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
“You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday”
― Jack Kerouac
“all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“It’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way–a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word ‘beat’ spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America–beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction–We’d even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer–It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization–the subterraneans heroes who’d finally turned from the ‘freedom’ machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the ‘derangement of the senses,’ talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation–The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what’s more we knew about it–But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds–We’d stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We’d write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new ‘angels’ of the American underground–In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet’s ‘peace’ officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.”
― Jack Kerouac
“It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“The silence was an intense roar.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“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
“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, On the Road
“The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don’t care, it still belongs to me”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.”
― 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, On the Road
“Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.
‘I love love,’ she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“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, On the Road
“my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Aw I don’t wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.’…
But you’ll miss all that, just for some old wine.’
There’s wisdom in wine, goddam it!’ I yelled. ‘Have a shot!”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I’m right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim…”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels
“and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?”
― Jack Kerouac
“I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”
― Kerouac
“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
“I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time– all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“No matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“If you own a rug you own too much.”
― Jack Kerouac
“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can’t fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
“I don’t wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.”
― Jack Kerouac
“because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
― Jack Kerouac
“It all ends in tears anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac
“My witness is the empty sky.”
― Jack Kerouac
“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll
“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.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, “God, I love you” and looked to the sky and really meant it. “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.” To the children and the innocent it’s all the same.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”
― Jack Kerouac
“It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”
― Jack Kerouac
“What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“a sociable smile is nothing but a mouth full of teeth”
― Jack Kerouac
“Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll
“Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars. ”
― Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940-1956
“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.”
― Jack Kerouac
“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
“I just won’t sleep,” I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.”
― Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
“As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk”
― Jack Kerouac
“If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understandings.”
― Jack Kerouac
“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life 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. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die…”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.”
― 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
“I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll
“I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.”
― 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
“Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“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, On the Road
“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”
― Jack Kerouac
“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“My eyes were glued on life
and they were full of tears.”
― Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
“the road is life”
― 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, On the Road
“They build their own Hells.”
― 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, On the Road
“The beauty of things must be that they end.”
― Jack Kerouac, Tristessa
“So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels
Conclusion
The top Jack Kerouac outlined in this post are broad given how diverse they are.
You’ll be getting wide sayings from a famous author and if you’re a fan of this writer, his quotes may be just what you need.
