Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “And when the fog’s over and the stars and the moon come out at night it’ll be a beautiful sight.”

— Jack Kerouac

152. “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

— Jack Kerouac

153. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac

154. “This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.”

— Jack Kerouac

155. “I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?”

— Jack Kerouac

156. “I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

— Jack Kerouac

157. “I’m afraid that you’ll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you’ll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased. The thing that makes me different from all of you is the vast inner life I have. I just thrive in this, by nature. The bigger and deeper this inner life grows, the less anyone of you will understand me. That’s okay.”

— Jack Kerouac

158. “Ray, what you got to do is go climb a mountain...”

— Jack Kerouac

159. “Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”

— Jack Kerouac

160. “When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.”

— Jack Kerouac

161. “You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday.”

— Jack Kerouac

162. “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.”

— Jack Kerouac

163. “Some’s bastards, some’s ain’t. That’s the score.”

— Jack Kerouac

164. “The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.”

— Jack Kerouac

165. “Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.”

— Jack Kerouac

166. “You know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.”

— Jack Kerouac

167. “It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.”

— Jack Kerouac

168. “Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH...”

— Jack Kerouac

169. “The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”

— Jack Kerouac

170. “Everything’s alright, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, and we’re here forever, in one form or another, which is empty. Everything’s alright, we’re not here, there, or anywhere.”

— Jack Kerouac

171. “Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.”

— Jack Kerouac

172. “And I said, ‘That last thing is what you can’t get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.”

— Jack Kerouac

173. “I felt free and therefore I was free.”

— Jack Kerouac

174. “You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.”

— Jack Kerouac

175. “The dream is already ended and we’re already awake in the golden eternity.”

— Jack Kerouac

176. “The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be “supervised.””

— Jack Kerouac

177. “I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.”

— Jack Kerouac

178. “Your Buddhism has made you mean Ray and makes you even afraid to take your clothes off for a simple healthy orgy.”

— Jack Kerouac

179. “Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.”

— Jack Kerouac

180. “What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.”

— Jack Kerouac

181. “I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all.”

— Jack Kerouac

182. “I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.”

— Jack Kerouac

183. “I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”

— Jack Kerouac

184. “And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!”

— Jack Kerouac

185. “Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better.”

— Jack Kerouac

186. “We had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

— Jack Kerouac

187. “We are nothing. – Tomorrow we may be die. We are nothing. – You and me.”

— Jack Kerouac

188. “Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain’t this and that at all?”

— Jack Kerouac

189. “It’s hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.”

— Jack Kerouac

190. “As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk.”

— Jack Kerouac

191. “I think it’s a lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.”

— Jack Kerouac

192. “We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell.”

— Jack Kerouac

193. “And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I went into the West.”

— Jack Kerouac

194. “Meditate outdoors. The dark trees at night are not really the dark trees at night, it’s only the golden eternity.”

— Jack Kerouac

195. “I’d rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.”

— Jack Kerouac

196. “Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion.”

— Jack Kerouac

197. “I suddenly discovered the delight of rebellion.”

— Jack Kerouac

198. “But no matter, the road is life.”

— Jack Kerouac

199. “The silence was an intense roar.”

— Jack Kerouac

200. “They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.”

— Jack Kerouac