Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”

— Jack Kerouac

252. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

264. “Love is all.”

— Jack Kerouac

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

275. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

278. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

280. “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

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

— 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. “I’m afraid that you’ll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you’ll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased.”

— Jack Kerouac

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

295. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

299. “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

300. “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