Quotes from Jack Kerouac

They'll eat your heart alive Every time.

He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long. On Starvation Ridge little sticks Are trying to grow.

I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.

Actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else.

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.

Sembra che io abbia una costituzione che non regge l'alcol e ancor di meno l'idiozia e l'incoerenza.

Pero ¿por que pensar en eso cuando la tierra dorada se extendía delante de nosotros y estaban acechándonos todo tipo de acontecimientos imprevistos para sorprendernos y hacer que nos alegráramos de estar vivos y verlos?

Snap your finger stop the world - rain falls harder

Her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse.

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? —it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. We

Il pouvait à peine placer un mot tellement ça l'excitait de vivre.

but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man- 'twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in from of all our phantom unjuandiced eyes, friends.

Sometimes I'd yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel - What is the meaning of the void? The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.

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... though as I say comparisons _are_ odious, but what we're saying now is true.

One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.

Poor [Jack Kerouac], his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it's such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live.

I promise I shall never give up and that I'll die yelling and laughing.

Smith you don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others. The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.

Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in.

You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything.

I have nothing to offer anybody expect my own confusion.

And after a refreshing sleep filled with cobwebby dreams of my past life in the East I got up, washed in the station men's room, and strode off, fit and slick as a fiddle, and got me a rich thick milkshake at the roadhouse to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach.

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? —it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.