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Jack Kerouac
73 quotes
“And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could give you a list a mile long of the homosexuals in the arts but there's no point in making a big tzimis about a relatively harmless and cool state of affairs — Each man to his own tastes.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything is going to the beat — It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's your Karma ripe as peaches.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sociable smile is nothing but teeth.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm writing this book because we're all going to die — In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid...”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If only I had the magic self of babyhood when I remembered what it was like before I was born, I wouldn't worry about death now knowing both to be the same empty dream.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(...) who is he that is not 'he' because of an idiot's ignorance?”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(...) comes under the influence of old French Fairies who accuse him of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mankind is like dogs, not gods — as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you — but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My witness is the empty sky.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, 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 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 (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Trouble with you is you don't do plenty night zazen especially when it's cold out, that's best, besides you should get married and have halfbreed babies, manuscripts, homespun blankets and mother's milk on your happy ragged mat floor like this one. Get yourself a hut house not too far from town, live cheap, go ball in the bars once in awhile, write and rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and talk to grandmas you damn fool, carry loads of wood for them, clap your hands at shrines, get supernatural favors, take flower-arrangement lessons and grow chrysanthemums by the door, and get married for krissakes, get a friendly smart sensitive human-being gal who don't give a shit for martinis every night and all that dumb white shit in the kitchen.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything is the same, the fog says 'We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,' and the leaves say 'We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that's all, we come and go, grow and fall' — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say 'We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season' — The tree stumps say 'We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth' — Men say 'We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.'”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But O Sarina come with me to my bed of woes, let me love you gently in the night, long time, we got all night, till dawn, till Juliet's rising sun and Romeo's vial sink, till I have slaked my thirst of Samsara at your portal rosy petal lips and left saviour juice in your rosy flesh garden to melt and dry and ululate another baby for the void, come sweet Sarina in my naughty arms, be dirty in my clean milk, and I'll detest the defecate I leave in your milky empowered cyst-and-vulva chamber, your cloacan clara file-hool through which slowly drool the hall-gyzm, to castles in your hassel flesh and I'll protect you trembling thighs against my heart and kiss your lips and cheeks and Lair and love you everywhere and that'll be that...”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the West, spine heights at the world's end, coast of blue Pacific starry night — nobone halfbanana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onwards, illuminate. — The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass — orangebutted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher the level of the world, low and flat: the charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, in anguish, nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some), but I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's an innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectal propaganda and Comintern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar, assumes that the truth-teller is lying too.”
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) said by 1969 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source