Quotes from Jack Kerouac

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain's million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?

I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours

Ray, what you got to do is go climb a mountain...

Then it's goodbye, Sangsara for me Besides, girls aren't as good as they look And Samadhi is better than you think When it starts in hitting your head In with Buzz of glittergold Heaven's Angels, wailing, saying We've been waiting for you since morning, Jack Why were you so long dallying in the sooty room? This transcendental Brilliance Is the better part (of Nothingness I sing) Okay. Quit. Mad. Stop.

Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.

Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...

We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night...

Last night I walked clear down to Times Square & just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost - it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.

The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up to the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, its béat, 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.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness...

It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

Here I was at the end of America...no more land...and nowhere was nowhere to go but back

and I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow - And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too. A long way to go.

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

And it's finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for cities at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings'll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillnes in the wilds- So I tell myself Be Wise.

Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.

Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.

I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light.

Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.

Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don't look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you're floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you're struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.