Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”

— Jack Kerouac

202. “Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.”

— Jack Kerouac

203. “Genius gives birth, talent delivers.”

— Jack Kerouac

204. “Don’t be a sucker all your life, dummy up, ya dope.”

— Jack Kerouac

205. “Bein Crazy is the least of my worries.”

— Jack Kerouac

206. “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...”

— Jack Kerouac

207. “The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.”

— Jack Kerouac

208. “Meanwhile the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom...”

— Jack Kerouac

209. “Life is life, and kind is kind.”

— Jack Kerouac

210. “And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once.”

— Jack Kerouac

211. “While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.”

— Jack Kerouac

212. “The road must eventually lead to the whole world.”

— Jack Kerouac

213. “Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness.”

— Jack Kerouac

214. “My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.”

— Jack Kerouac

215. “Dean’s California – wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”

— Jack Kerouac

216. “I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.”

— Jack Kerouac

217. “It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.”

— Jack Kerouac

218. “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

219. “Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.”

— Jack Kerouac

220. “Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.”

— Jack Kerouac

221. “At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.”

— Jack Kerouac

222. “Go moan for man. It’s the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.”

— Jack Kerouac

223. “If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adiron dacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever – think of that wonderful Hudson Valley.”

— Jack Kerouac

224. “Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.”

— Jack Kerouac

225. “Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

— Jack Kerouac

226. “My shoes are clean from walking in the rain.”

— Jack Kerouac

227. “I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”

— Jack Kerouac

228. “And still the Void is still and’ll never move – But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.”

— Jack Kerouac

229. “He was BEAT – the root, the soul of Beatific.”

— Jack Kerouac

230. “It’s okay, girl, we’ll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We’re fallen angels who didn’t believe that nothing means nothing.”

— Jack Kerouac

231. “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.”

— Jack Kerouac

232. “I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air – air you can kiss – and palms.”

— Jack Kerouac

233. “Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.”

— Jack Kerouac

234. “I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.”

— Jack Kerouac

235. “Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

237. “I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.”

— Jack Kerouac

238. “Return those shoes to the shoemaker Return this hand to my father This pillow to the pillowmaker Those slippers to the shop. That wainscot to the carpenter, But my mind my tranquil and eternal Mind Return it to whom?”

— Jack Kerouac

239. “A peaceful sorrow at home is the best I’ll ever be able to offer the world, in the end, and so I told my desolation angels goodbye. A new life for me.”

— Jack Kerouac

240. “But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”

— Jack Kerouac

241. “Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went.”

— Jack Kerouac

242. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

244. “Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.”

— Jack Kerouac

245. “Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

246. “Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation.”

— Jack Kerouac

247. “I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn’t give a damn.”

— Jack Kerouac

248. “And he had a nice home in Ohio with wife, daughter, Christmas tree, two cars, garage, lawn, lawnmower, but he couldn’t enjoy any of it because he really wasn’t free. It was sadly true.”

— Jack Kerouac

249. “The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie.”

— Jack Kerouac

250. “Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”

— Jack Kerouac