Quotes from Jack Kerouac

I'm afraid that you'll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you'll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased. The thing that makes me different from all of you is the vast inner life I have. I just thrive in this, by nature. The bigger and deeper this inner life grows, the less anyone of you will understand me. That's okay.

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong.

my lion is fed, I sleep at his side.

Nature endlessly in every direction inward to your body and outward into space.

Meditate outdoors. The dark trees at night are not really the dark trees at night, it's only the golden eternity.

Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the East, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist.

We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far.

I cried for it. That's how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.

Maybe that bird that floats hill belly on the wind up there, and that cat that pats in this grass, is the same Infinite Worldwide Angel

I have fallen in love with you,God.

I woke up from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where, because I couldn't see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive on.

Everything was everlastingly loose and responsive, it was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond emptyspace blue.

What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgements and pray for the light.

little absent from everything in the way of a Zen Master actually who realizes that everything is indifferent anyway

Everyone looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops-- a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?

My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.

There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look.

Did they know that he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour...this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?

Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and 'kitchen machinery' he calls it? People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums.

Be in love with everything .

I'm merely exploring souls & cities From the vantage point Of my ivory tower built, Built with the assistance of Opium That's enough, isnt it?

I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.

So you're leaving, Yo." We called each other Yo.

I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men.