Jack Kerouac Quotes

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.

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

...the stars are fixed in rooftops like ink.

…of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth.

And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.

It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.

And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.

We've got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

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

The only truth is music.

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.

Love is bitter, death is sweet.

The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words.

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!

We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.

It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.

My eyes were glued on lifeand they were full of tears.

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100.

The eyes of hope looking over the flare of the hood into the maw with its white line feeding in straight as an arrow, the lighting of fresh cigarettes, the buckling to lean forward to the next adventure something that's been going on in America ever since the covered wagons clocked the deserts in three months flat—

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.

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

Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!

Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood.

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

The earth will always be the same - only cities and history will change, even nations will change, governments and governors will go, the things made by men's hands will go, buildings will always crumble - only the earth will remain the same, there will always be men on the earth in the morning, there will always be the things made by God's hands - and all this history of cities and congress now will go, all modern history is only a littering Babylon smoking under the sun, delaying the day when men again will have to return to earth, to the earth of life and God -

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.

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.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

The tasteof rain-- Why kneel?

And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep.