Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “DEAR BABY, Isn’t it good to know winter is coming –.”

— Jack Kerouac

203. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

205. “I don’t know when we’ll meet again or what’ll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I’ve grown two months older and there’s all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

207. “I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.”

— Jack Kerouac

208. “You’re a Genius all the time.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

211. “Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.”

— Jack Kerouac

212. “The silence was an intense roar.”

— Jack Kerouac

213. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

218. “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

219. “Genius gives birth, talent delivers.”

— Jack Kerouac

220. “He doesn’t need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.”

— Jack Kerouac

221. “There is nowhere to go but everywhere.”

— Jack Kerouac

222. “Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I’d realize what there is, is ecstasy.”

— Jack Kerouac

223. “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

224. “They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-“Where are you going?” which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, “Where are you going?“-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society “Looking for peace.”

— Jack Kerouac

225. “Life is not an apology.”

— Jack Kerouac

226. “Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

228. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

230. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

235. “Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize “The stars are words” and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind. There’s no need for solitude. So love life for what it is, and form no preconceptions whatever in your mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

236. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

245. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

247. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac