Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

253. “I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.”

— Jack Kerouac

254. “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

255. “Es que el mundo que nos rodea es demasiado grande, y es el adios. Pero nos lanzamos hacia adelante en busca de la proxima aventura disparatada bajo los cielos.”

— Jack Kerouac

256. “A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.”

— Jack Kerouac

257. “Love is all.”

— Jack Kerouac

258. “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

259. “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

260. “I want to marry a girl,” I told them, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old.”

— Jack Kerouac

261. “Soon I’ll find the right words, they’ll be very simple.”

— Jack Kerouac

262. “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

263. “You aren’t ever going to be anything in this world unless you do what you want to do, when you want to do it – don’t plan anything, just go out and do it.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

267. “An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else.”

— Jack Kerouac

268. “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

269. “I had an overwhelming urge to close my eyes in company. I think the girls were terrified of this. “What’s he always sitting with his eyes closed for?”

— Jack Kerouac

270. “It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,? she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her – I wanta be chased till eternity till I catch her.”

— Jack Kerouac

271. “I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.”

— Jack Kerouac

272. “He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence.”

— Jack Kerouac

273. “After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.”

— Jack Kerouac

274. “You have absolutely no regard but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and that there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.”

— Jack Kerouac

275. “The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.”

— Jack Kerouac

276. “We all agree it’s too big to keep up with, that we’re surrounded by life, that we’ll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it’s empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.”

— Jack Kerouac

277. “Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears.”

— Jack Kerouac

278. “I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.”

— Jack Kerouac

279. “Ripples in the upside-down lake of the void, is what I should have said. The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down.”

— Jack Kerouac

280. “I looked up at the sky; the pure, wonderful stars were still there, burning.”

— Jack Kerouac

281. “Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don’t need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days...”

— Jack Kerouac

282. “Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...”

— Jack Kerouac

283. “For the next week that was all I heard – manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”

— Jack Kerouac

284. “Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness...”

— Jack Kerouac

285. “Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the East, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father’s mist.”

— Jack Kerouac

286. “To the children and the innocent it’s all the same.”

— Jack Kerouac

287. “Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

289. “Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind.” But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off.”

— Jack Kerouac

290. “Mainly I’ve been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As I’m writing this, the radio says there’s a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now.”

— Jack Kerouac

291. “I’d also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death.”

— Jack Kerouac

292. “The straight line will take you only to death.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

294. “There is a blessedness surely to be believed, and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.”

— Jack Kerouac

295. “One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they’ve been doing they weren’t sure it was right – lambies all over the world.”

— Jack Kerouac

296. “I always thought October was a kind old Love-light.”

— Jack Kerouac

297. “I wonder why our life must quiver between beauty and guilt, consummation and sadness, desire and regret, immortality and tattered moments unknowable, truth and beautiful meaningful lies.”

— Jack Kerouac

298. “It’s only through form that we can realize emptiness.”

— Jack Kerouac

299. “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

300. “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.”

— Jack Kerouac