Quotes from Jack Kerouac

Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

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

We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.

Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are still pretty glorious.

Bein Crazy is the least of my worries.

Overpowered by the sadness of not knowing what there is in the world, and what I'm doing. Feeling completely indifferent to good and evil too, to beauty or anything else. I know that this is the root of all human troubles, all of them. Indifferent to that knowledge, too. Nothing got written.

It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.

Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.

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....

Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!

And then we'll all go off to sweet life, 'cause now is the time and we all know time!

Hateful bitch of a world, it wouldn't ever last.

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.

America is a lonely crock of shit...

I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.

I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.

She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.

The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.

That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.