Quotes from Jack Kerouac

I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely phsycial realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came

The words are clear as in the reflection of the world on the water. Therefore write the Word at once, everywhere, from now till your hand is paralyzed, for THERE will be your work for GOD, since you can not work for God in other ways, and would not, & don't know how, or bend that way, from habit, & from talent in the use & signification & arrangement of the Word.

those who're good stay in Heaven,they've been in Heaven from the beginning

I'm stuck struggling in the cold water, and all I can do is grieve, grieve, in the hoar necessitous horror of the morning, bitterly I hate myself, bitterly it's too late yet while I feel better I still feel ephemeral and unreal and unable to straighten my thoughts or even really grieve, in fact I feel too stupid to be really bitter, in short I don't know what I'm doing and I'm being told what to do...

O love, fled me - or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night?

Believe in the holy contour of life

They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-Where are you going? which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, Where are you going?-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society Looking for peace.

Because now I am grown so old and neutral....

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.

It's impossible to fall of mountains you fool!

What is a rainbow, Lord? A hoop for the lowly.

Sal, straight, no matter where I live, my trunk's always sticking out from under the bed, I'm ready to leave or get thrown out. I've decided to leave everything out of my hands. You've seen me try and break my ass to make it and you know that it doesn't matter and we know time — how to slow it up and walk and dig and just old-fashioned spade kicks, what other kicks are there? We know.

I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it.

I'm an idealist who has outgrown my idealism I have nothing to do the rest of my life but do it and the rest of my life to do it

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain." Jack Kerouac

There is nowhere to go but everywhere.

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach and which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the Angels dove off and flew into infinity.

everybody saying O how wonderful life is, how miraculous, God made this and God made that, how do you know he doesnt hate what He did: He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done

The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words.

besides which Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood.

In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted.

But let a perpetual smile of peace and satisfaction On your lips Be a symbol of the decision To think happiness (equanimity) Since everything that happens Happens in your head

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.