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Jack Kerouac Quotes | Quotes said by Jack Kerouac

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #1

    - Dobbiamo andare e non fermarci finché non siamo arrivati.
    - Dove andiamo?
    - Non lo so, ma dobbiamo andare.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #2

    ...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 Quote #3

    ...because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #4

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

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #5

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

    Page 100.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #6

    ...do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #7

    ...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. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #8

    ...the restaurant itself is weird especially because of a big raunch mad thicklipped sloppy young Fillipino woman sitting alone at the end of the restaurant gobbling up her food obscenely and looking at us insolently as tho to say Fuck you, I eat the way I like splashing gravy everywhere (p. 156)

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #9

    ...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #10

    „w Kalifornii nie trzeba miec domu, bo nigdy nie jest zimno” mówi Slim i smieje sie radosnie. „Rany w zyciu nie widzialas takich slicznych slonecznych dni, ze przez wiekszosc roku nawet nie potrzeba plaszcza ani wegla do ogrzewania domu ani zimowych butów ani nic. I nigdy nie umiera sie z goraca w lecie tam na pólnocy we frisco i Oakland i okolicach. Mówie ci, to jest miejsce do zycia. I nie da sie juz pojechac dalej w Ameryce, zostaje tylko woda i Rosja”.
    „A co jest zlego w Nowym Jorku?” warczy matka Sheili.
    „Och, nic!” Slim pokazuje na okno, „Ocean Atlantycki przynosi diabelne wiatry w zimie i jakis szatanski syn przenosi te wiatry na ulice, tak ze czlowiek moze zamarznac na progu. Bóg zawiesil slonce nad wyspa Manhattan, ale diabel nie wpusci go w twoje okno, chyba ze kupisz sobie mieszkanie w domu wysokim na mile, ale wtedy nawet nie mozna wyjsc odetchnac powietrzem, bo mozna spasc te mile na dól, o ile w ogóle cie stac na takie mieszkanie. Mozna pracowac, ale wtedy w ogóle nie ma sie czasu, bo osiem godzin pracy to dwanascie bo trzeba doliczyc te wszystkie metra, autobusy, windy, tunele, promy, schody i znowu windy i jeszcze czekanie, bo to wielkie i beznadziejne miasto. Ale nie, w Nowym Jorku nie ma nic zlego.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #11

    A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    A poet is a blind optimist.
    The world is against him for
    many reasons. But the
    poet persists. He believes
    that he is on the right track,
    no matter what any of his
    fellow men say. In his
    eternal search for truth, the
    poet is alone.
    He tries to be timeless in a
    society built on time.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to 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 Quote #16

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

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #17

    All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #18

    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.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #19

    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).

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #20

    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...

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #21

    And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #22

    And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep.

    Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.

    'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #23

    And I go home having lost her love.
    And write this book.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #24

    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)

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    and rain will fall on our eaves.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #27

    And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #28

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

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #29

    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.

  • Jack Kerouac Quote #30

    And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.

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