Quotes from Jack Kerouac

Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that 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 experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

You can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go

All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep [...].

There is a kind of dreary monotony about there characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull.

Fury spat out of his eyes when he told of things he hated; great glows of joy replaced this when he suddenly got happy; every muscle twitched to live and go.

I felt like laughing, he loomed so funny. But the moutains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that matter so was I, and in fact, laughter is solemn

Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy….

I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

The world ain't so bad, when you got Japhies, I thought, and felt glad.

kind of liked him; not because he was a good sort, as he later proved to be, but because he was enthusiastic about things.

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

There was something virile in her attitude toward tragedy, as though she were defying God to knock off the chip He Himself had placed on her shoulder.

I hope you get where you're going, and be happy when you do.

Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.

the whole world's coming on like a high school sophomore eager to learn what he calls New things, mind you, the same old sing-song sad song truth of death . . . because the reason I yell death so much is because I'm really yelling life, because you cant have death without life

Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not publishing's -

And what's the purpose of all this?"—"Ah Daddy, maybe just to see you again and we can talk about purposes anywhere: you wanta go on a lecture tour to Utah university and Brown university and tell the well scrubbed kids?"—"Scrubbed with what?"—"Scrubbed with hopeless perfection of pioneer puritan hope that leaves nothing but dead pigeons to look at?

Revolutionary consciousness is to be found / Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:

Dean took out other pictures. 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, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and begin ningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium. in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.

the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

In fact we're all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight livingroom for nothing

I suddenly began to realize that everyone in America is a natural-born thief.

arrastraba los pies tras ellos como he venido haciendo toda mi vida con la gente que me interesa, porque la única gente que me interesa es la que está loca, la que está loca por vivir, por hablar, ávida de todas las cosas a un tiempo, la gente que jamás bosteza o dice un lugar común..., sino que arde, arde, arde como candelas romanas en medio de la noche.