Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

— Jack Kerouac

52. “It’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

— Jack Kerouac

53. “Something great is about to happen to me: I’m about to love somebody very much.”

— Jack Kerouac

54. “It all ends in tears anyway.”

— Jack Kerouac

55. “Pain or love or danger makes you real again...”

— Jack Kerouac

56. “What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?”

— Jack Kerouac

57. “Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

— Jack Kerouac

58. “Don’t touch me, I’m full of snakes.”

— Jack Kerouac

59. “I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

— Jack Kerouac

60. “The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”

— Jack Kerouac

61. “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk – real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

— Jack Kerouac

62. “Life must be rich and full of loving – it’s no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.”

— Jack Kerouac

63. “We agreed to love each other madly.”

— Jack Kerouac

64. “Pretty girls make graves.”

— Jack Kerouac

65. “You are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration.”

— Jack Kerouac

66. “I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”

— Jack Kerouac

67. “Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”

— Jack Kerouac

68. “It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now – girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.”

— Jack Kerouac

69. “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.”

— Jack Kerouac

70. “I don’t wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.”

— Jack Kerouac

71. “What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?”

— Jack Kerouac

72. “Nothing ever happened – Not even this.”

— Jack Kerouac

73. “Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...”

— Jack Kerouac

74. “If you tell a true story, you can’t be wrong.”

— Jack Kerouac

75. “My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

— Jack Kerouac

76. “They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”

— Jack Kerouac

77. “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.”

— Jack Kerouac

78. “I’d sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.”

— Jack Kerouac

79. “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.”

— Jack Kerouac

80. “My life is a vast inconsequential epic.”

— Jack Kerouac

81. “There are worse things than being mad.”

— Jack Kerouac

82. “For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.”

— Jack Kerouac

83. “And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”

— Jack Kerouac

84. “Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?”

— Jack Kerouac

85. “Don’t tell them too much about your soul. They’re waiting for just that.”

— Jack Kerouac

86. “You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.”

— Jack Kerouac

87. “At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.”

— Jack Kerouac

88. “We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.”

— Jack Kerouac

89. “Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

90. “I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.”

— Jack Kerouac

91. “Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.”

— Jack Kerouac

92. “Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.”

— Jack Kerouac

93. “Cats yawn because they realize that there’s nothing to do.”

— Jack Kerouac

94. “We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.”

— Jack Kerouac

95. “My witness is the empty sky.”

— Jack Kerouac

96. “Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.”

— Jack Kerouac

97. “I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

— Jack Kerouac

98. “Never mistake talking about writing for actual writing.”

— Jack Kerouac

99. “The taste of rain – Why kneel?”

— Jack Kerouac

100. “The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.”

— Jack Kerouac