Quotes from Jack Kerouac

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

New Orleans is a very dull town. It's against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary.

Ere so sober Emily/ Did New England sow/ With brooms of activity/ I'd the tree-rock spoken to.

Locomotives smoked and reeled above him. His shadow followed him, it aped his walk and thoughts and very being.

They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned—and Dean sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go. At nine o'clock in the morning everybody—musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist—staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.

The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and the mud and the molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.

the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all of my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night.

As for my mother, there's no other like her in the world, really. Did she bear me just to have a little child to bless her heart? She got her wish.

There's a purpose to knowledge … salvation. What good are my visions or your visions, beautifully and laboriously worked out in art, if the purpose of it is not to save something in our souls and make it all beautiful.

Everything was being mixed up, and all was falling.

The grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American Night.

Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experiences (though we hate to admit it) in death.

Que sensação é essa, quando você está se afastando das pessoas e elas retrocedem na planície até você ver o espectro delas se dissolvendo? – é o vasto mundo nos engolindo, e é o adeus.

A little weariness'll change a lot of things.

Dean's California - wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and ecentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

Port Allen – onde o rio é todo chuva e rosas sob uma escuridão nebulosa e insignificante, onde entramos numa estrada sinuosa sob a luminosidade amarelada da neblina, e, de repente, numa volta, vislumbramos o viscoso vulto volátil escoando suas águas sob a ponte e cruzamos outra vez a eternidade.

at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!

The endless poem.

Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.

I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.

Pain or love or danger makes you real again, ain't that right

Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem.

the cause of death is birth