Quotes from Jack Kerouac

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.

I think it's a lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.

ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you

The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

I felt free and therefore I was free.

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.

But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.

But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do

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

It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

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.

Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

You have absolutely no regard but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what's hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you're silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and that there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.

You guys are going somewhere or just going?

I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.

La única gente que me interesa es la que está loca, la gente que está loca por vivir, loca por hablar, loca por salvarse, con ganas de todo al mismo tiempo, la gente que nunca bosteza ni habla de lugares comunes, sino que arde, arde como fabulosos cohetes amarillos explotando igual que arañas entre las estrellas.

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.

It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

The whole universe was crazy and cock-eyed and extremely strange.

Rocks are space, and space is illusion.