Quotes from Jack Kerouac

I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that's practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.

Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I'll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already.

and silence is the golden mountain

I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

I realize I'm just a silly stranger goofing with other strangers for no reason far away from anything that ever mattered to me what that was--Always an ephemeral visitor to the Coast nevery really involved with anyone's lives there because I'm always ready to fly back across the country but not to any life of my own on the other end either, just a traveling stranger like Old Bull Balloon... (p. 178)

I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far receding hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.

Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies (214).

My witness is the empty sky. My reward is the perfect blue sky at dawn in the desert in a bird-resounding riverbottom grove.

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.

It's all too much and not enough at the same time.

The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact, not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

I didn't bring my peremptory tone to bear in regard to what you'd just said about the unnecessariness of sleep but only, only , mind you, because of the fact that I absolutely, simply, purely and without any whatevers have to sleep now, I mean, man, my eyes are closing, they're redhot, sore, tired, beat...

it's all the same to me as long as it can be exciting and goes around the world.

When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter? And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.

We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.

The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.

The road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain't nowhere else it can go - right?

Everything is all right forever and forever and forever.

O Rosey, why don't you stay just home and eat chocolate bars and read Boswell all this society-izing will bring you nothing but lines of anxiety on your face -- and a sociable smile ain't nothing but teeth

Dreams were so irrational, so gray with a nameless terror . . . and yet, too, so haunting and beautiful.

What's Your Road, Man?

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.