Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “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

452. “I cried for it. That’s how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.”

— Jack Kerouac

453. “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

454. “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

455. “One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.”

— Jack Kerouac

456. “There is nowhere to go but everywhere.”

— Jack Kerouac

457. “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

458. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

461. “I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”

— Jack Kerouac

462. “Life is not an apology.”

— Jack Kerouac

463. “I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.”

— Jack Kerouac

464. “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

465. “Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “Be in love with everything .”

— Jack Kerouac

472. “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

473. “They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-“Where are you going?” which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, “Where are you going?“-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society “Looking for peace.”

— Jack Kerouac

474. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

484. “There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

486. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

488. “Senevabitch Jackcrack, vugup huh?”

— Jack Kerouac

489. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

492. “Somewhere in the vast jewelry of the Long Island night we walked, in wind and rain...”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

494. “I was getting drunk and didn’t care; everything was fine.”

— Jack Kerouac

495. “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

496. “All I want from this book is a living, enough money to make a living, buy a farm and some land, work it, write some more, travel a little, and so on.”

— Jack Kerouac

497. “And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.”

— Jack Kerouac

498. “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

499. “People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal.”

— Jack Kerouac

500. “I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery.”

— Jack Kerouac