Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.”

— Jack Kerouac

152. “It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate’s so easy compared.”

— Jack Kerouac

153. “The tree looks like a dog, barking at heaven.”

— Jack Kerouac

154. “You can’t fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

156. “My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

— Jack Kerouac

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

168. “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

169. “This was really the way my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

174. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

182. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

184. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

187. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

192. “I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac