Best 478 quotes of Jack Kerouac on MyQuotes

All of life is a foreign country.

A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street.

a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn't got any money: he doesn't need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

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.

Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain.

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.

all day long wearing a hat that wasn't on my head

All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers.

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.

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

All the souls to explore! - It's not so necessary to love, really, as it is to settle something deep with all of those who really matter. Love and hate are the same things, differently sifted through personal... pride, or what have you... personal pride or even just personal-ness.

A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.

And he had a nice home in Ohio with wife, daughter, Christmas tree, two cars, garage, lawn, lawnmower, but he couldn't enjoy any of it because he really wasn't free. It was sadly true.

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

and I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow - And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too. A long way to go.

and nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

...and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

and silence is the golden mountain

And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.

And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once.

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

And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.

And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?

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.

Anybody doesn't like these pitchers don't like potry, see? Anybody don't like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

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?

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.

As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.

As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

A sociable smile is nothing but a mouth full of teeth.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.

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.

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

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!

beautiful insane in the rain

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents.

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.

Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??

Be in love with your life, every detail of it.

Believe in the holy contour of life.

Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.