Quotes from Jack Kerouac

difficult to make a real confession and show what happened when you're such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big sole details about others go sitting and waiting around)

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

What a horror it would have been if the world was real.

Like Goethe at 80, you know the futility of love and you shrug--you shrug away the warm kiss

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

In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.

This is the beginning and the end of the world right here. Look at those patient Buddhas lookin at us saying nothing.

If you can't boogie I know I'll show you how.

I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddamit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.

There's nothing wrong with you Ray, your only trouble is you never learned to get out to spots like this, you've let the world drown you in its horseshit and you've been vexed...

Eager for bread and love.

I felt like telling Japhy everything I thought but I knew it didn't matter and moreover he knew it anyway and silence is the golden mountain.

Dean: God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way, I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us - that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel - the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep.

Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears.

Back in the cabin I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves skittering on the tin roof, it's August in Big Sur --- I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly remember them from long ago

Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.

But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility.

Love is bitter, death is sweet.

the loneliness…the "inexpressibly delicious sensation of this memory - for as memories are older they're like wine rarer, till if you find a real old memory, one of infancy, not an established often tasted one but a brand new one, it would taste better than the Napoleon brandy Stendhal himself must have stared at…

New York gets god awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets.

Did you ever stand on a street corner in American at five o'clock in the morning? I did.

All the souls to explore! - It's not so necessary to love , really, as it is to settle something deep with all of those who really matter. Love and hate are the same things, differently sifted through personal... pride , or what have you... personal pride or even just personal-ness.

I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields...

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.