Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “You can’t fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name.”

— Jack Kerouac

152. “I’d rather be thin than famous but I’m fat paste that in your broadway show.”

— Jack Kerouac

153. “Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.”

— Jack Kerouac

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

159. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

161. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

166. “That’s the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.”

— Jack Kerouac

167. “I petted the dogs who didn’t argue with me ever. All dogs love God. They’re wiser than their masters.”

— Jack Kerouac

168. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

177. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

180. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

185. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

191. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

198. “Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

— Jack Kerouac

199. “Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what’s coming next except that you’re burning the road to outrun it.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac