Quotes from Jack Kerouac

The straight line will take you only to death.

the sudden vast diamond silence of the forest

Be in love with your life every minute of it.

The cop who had been an Alcatraz guard was potbellied and about sixty, retired but unable to keep away from the atmospheres that had nourished his dry soul all his life.

I'm going to write ceaselessly about the dignity of human beings no matter who and or what they are, and the less dignity a person has the fewer words I'll use.

I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer.

Papier-mache canals flowed in downtown Lowell, men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect the drizzle hopelessness of 1926.

Ele não ficou satisfeito com a ideia de Arada de um 'eu' sendo limpo e purificado para o céu. Ele não viu 'eu' na matéria. Nada a ser purificado. E viu a cobiça pelo céu como nada além de atividade em um sonho. Ele soube que, quando observadas do ponto de vista da mente verdadeira, todas as coisas eram como castelos mágicos no ar.

All these people," said Japhy, "they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom." He had a million ideas, he had 'em all.

Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!

You know," I said, "I think it doesn't make any difference to him anyway. He's just satisfied to wander around and forget things.

And the girl gets married? I have a bunch of stray cats in my yard I wouldn't have a daughter

Dharmos negalima pamesti, nieko negalima pamesti gerai išmintame take.

We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I'd been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another

Au fond, Qu'est-ce qui est arrivé après ? — voilà la seule raison d'être de la vie ou d'une histoire.

Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness...

This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy

Alzo gli occhi, ecco lì le stelle, sempre le stesse, desolazione, e sotto gli angeli che non sanno di essere angeli. E Sarina morirà. Ed io morirò, e voi morirete, e tutti moriremo e persino le stelle si spegneranno una dopo l'altra con l'andar del tempo

Life was life no matter where one lived

Levántate y date una ducha, cabrón. –¿Qué pasa? –A mí no me vengas con qué pasa. Anoche fumaste marihuana. –Pero no era nada buena, de todos modos –dije, y me fui al baño.

I saw letters he wrote at age 14 before his recent spell of silence: they were perfectly normal and better than average writings, in fact sensitive and better than anything I could have written at 14 when I also was an innocent introverted monster.

I wished Dean and Carlo were there—then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The

With the coming of Dean Moriarity began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.

A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes--the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx.