Jack Kerouac Quotes - Page 3

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.
Jack Kerouac
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
Jack Kerouac
One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.
Jack Kerouac
Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back.
Jack Kerouac
What is the universe but a lot of wavesAnd a craving desire is a wave…
Jack Kerouac
Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.
Jack Kerouac
Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...
Jack Kerouac
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
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Jack Kerouac
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
Jack Kerouac
Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.
Jack Kerouac
And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
Jack Kerouac
I'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway show
Jack Kerouac
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.
Jack Kerouac
Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
Jack Kerouac
Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone
Jack Kerouac
They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.
Jack Kerouac
Love is bitter, death is sweet.
Jack Kerouac
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
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
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 golden eternity is { }
Jack Kerouac
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
Jack Kerouac
After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.
Jack Kerouac
The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac
It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.
Jack Kerouac
I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.
Jack Kerouac
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
So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry
Jack Kerouac
Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
Jack Kerouac
Pain or love or danger makes you real again....
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
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
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
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
And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.
Jack Kerouac