Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The more you study, the more you subsequently know; naturally, the more you know, the nearer you get to perfection as a journalist.”

— Jack Kerouac

452. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac

453. “God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive – the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.”

— Jack Kerouac

454. “The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories.”

— Jack Kerouac

455. “I’m back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it’s my one and only world, and I’ll do the best I can.”

— Jack Kerouac

456. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac

457. “Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it’s actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don’t you see that? By itself it’s a no-thing, it’s really mental, it’s seen only of your mind. In other words it’s empty and awake.”

— Jack Kerouac

458. “At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.”

— Jack Kerouac

459. “I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever.”

— Jack Kerouac

460. “We understood each other on other levels of madness.”

— Jack Kerouac

461. “Trouble is, what would I do with her once I won her?- it’s like winning an angel in hell and you are then entitled to go down with her to where it’s worse or maybe there’ll be light, some, down there, maybe it’s me’s crazy-.”

— Jack Kerouac

462. “I’m a fool, the new day rises on the world and on my foolish life: I’m a fool, I loved the blue dawns over racetracks and made a bet Ioway was sweet like its name, my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers, the wetness on the wire fence bugled me to belief, I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss – I am made of Cody, too -.”

— Jack Kerouac

463. “I wanted to know what ‘IT’ meant. ‘Ah well’ – Dean laughed – ’now you’re asking me impon-de-rables – ahem!”

— Jack Kerouac

464. “If you keep this up you’ll both go crazy, but let me know what happens as you go along.”

— Jack Kerouac

465. “Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God.”

— Jack Kerouac

466. “But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.”

— Jack Kerouac

467. “We’ve got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.”

— Jack Kerouac

468. “Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running – that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can’t hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that’s all.”

— Jack Kerouac

469. “Does this mean that frontiers from now on are to be in the imagination?”

— Jack Kerouac

470. “As for his hobby, drawing, he was better at that than most artists alive today and I always knew he was really a great young artist pretending to be withdrawn so people would leave him alone, also so people wouldn’t ask him to get a job.”

— Jack Kerouac

471. “The mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico – which was now something else in my mind – was like recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

473. “Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!”

— Jack Kerouac

474. “I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields...”

— Jack Kerouac

475. “Can’t you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything?”

— Jack Kerouac

476. “He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. ‘Look’, he said. ‘You’re a fish in a pond. It’s drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything’s going to be all right.”

— Jack Kerouac

477. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac

478. “Smith you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.”

— Jack Kerouac

479. “He sure is a crazy one,” she said. “Sure reminds me of my husband that run away. Just exactly the same guy. I sure hope my Mickey don’t grow up that way, they all do now.”

— Jack Kerouac

480. “It’s hypocrisy of men makes these hills grim.”

— Jack Kerouac

481. “I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person – I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? – What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?”

— Jack Kerouac

482. “Be in love with everything .”

— Jack Kerouac

483. “There ain’t no such thing as lumberjack, that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call ’em loggers.”

— Jack Kerouac

484. “She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.”

— Jack Kerouac

485. “That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That’s what I was trying to tell you – that’s what I want to be. I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.”

— Jack Kerouac

486. “This is the beginning and the end of the world right here. Look at those patient Buddhas lookin at us saying nothing.”

— Jack Kerouac

487. “For when destruction comes to the world of “history” and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.”

— Jack Kerouac

488. “It was a joy, though, to get down into the valley and lose sight of all that open sky space underneath everything and finally, as it got graying five o’clocking, about a hundred yards from the other boys and walking alone, to just pick my way singing and thinking along the little black cruds of a deer trail through the rocks, no call to think or look ahead or worry, just follow the little balls of deer crud with your eyes cast down and enjoy life.”

— Jack Kerouac

489. “I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.”

— Jack Kerouac

490. “I think my sudden love for this girl is a truer expression of myself than anything.”

— Jack Kerouac

491. “Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of ‘happy nuts,’ There’s a tightening around the head that hurts, there’s a terror of the mind that hurts even more, they’re so unhappy and especially because they can’t explain it to anybody.”

— Jack Kerouac

492. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac

493. “The world was upsidedown hanging in an ocean of endless space and here were all these people sitting in theatres watching movies.”

— Jack Kerouac

494. “All dogs love God. They’re wiser than their masters.”

— Jack Kerouac

495. “Life was life no matter where one lived.”

— Jack Kerouac

496. “They’ll eat your heart alive Every time.”

— Jack Kerouac

497. “Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.”

— Jack Kerouac

498. “Senevabitch Jackcrack, vugup huh?”

— Jack Kerouac

499. “Everything was everlastingly loose and responsive, it was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond emptyspace blue.”

— Jack Kerouac

500. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac