Jack Kerouac Quotes

Life is life, and kind is kind

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim...

In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.
'I love love,' she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.

It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."

A man needs truth like a machine needs oil.

Bein Crazy
is the least of my worries.

I could give you a list a mile long of the homosexuals in the arts but there's no point in making a big tzimis about a relatively harmless and cool state of affairs — Each man to his own tastes.

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.

I'm writing this book because we're all going to die — In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid...