Quotes from Jack Kerouac

Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.

I'm the golden eternity in mortal animate form.

And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.

I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.

And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.

You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse

Praised be I, writing, dead already and dead again

At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.

I like too many things and get confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.

It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.

a choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night.

Only a silly sober fool could think it; imagine gloating over such nonsense (because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was the pathway to wisdom lies through excess)

All around me were the noise of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john.

Ripples in the upside down lake of the void . . . The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down

I remember him standing under a streetlamp. 'Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?' I certainly agreed.

Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being (195).

In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk--it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love--I saw Maggie's black hair in this night-- In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery.

Se non scrivo quello che vedo effettivamente accadere su questo globo infelice racchiuso nei contorni del mio teschio penserò che il povero Dio mi abbia mandato sulla terra per niente.

By the time I went to bed I wasn't taken in by no Princess or no desire for no Princess and nobody's disapproval and I felt glad and slept well.

They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned.

Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind.

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.

I went off with him for no reason.