Quotes from Jack Kerouac

All of life is a foreign country.

most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -

The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

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

You were my last chance' she's said but don't all women say that? - But can it be by 'last chance' she doesn't mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we've shared -

Something that you feel will find its own form.

We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.

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.

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...

Down in Denver, all I did was die.

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

I'd rather be thin than famous but I'm fat paste that in your broadway show

O hell, I'm sick of life - If I had any guts I'd drown myself in that tiresome water but that wouldn't be getting it over at all, I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up in some other wretched suffering form eternities of it - I guess that's what the kid feels - She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.

I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.

the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. Allen

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...

He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.

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...

I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.

It's only through form that we can realize emptiness

Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.