Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read” – Sal Paradise, On The Road.”

— Jack Kerouac

302. “He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

304. “The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy.”

— Jack Kerouac

305. “How clear the realization one is going mad – the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

307. “Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, “God, I love you” and looked to the sky and really meant it. “I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.” To the children and the innocent it’s all the same.”

— Jack Kerouac

308. “He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.”

— Jack Kerouac

309. “February dawn – frost on the path Where I paced all winter.”

— Jack Kerouac

310. “I’ll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I’ll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I’ll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let’s hear yours.”

— Jack Kerouac

311. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

313. “Late afternoon, it was I not the void that changed.”

— Jack Kerouac

314. “I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

316. “This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.”

— Jack Kerouac

317. “There’s wisdom in wine.”

— Jack Kerouac

318. “You’re a Genius all the time.”

— Jack Kerouac

319. “There is universal substance which is divine substance because where else can it be?”

— Jack Kerouac

320. “With joy realize for the first time thinking just not thinking-so I don’t have to think anymore.”

— Jack Kerouac

321. “Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.”

— Jack Kerouac

322. “Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can’t fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”

— Jack Kerouac

323. “I told you it was kicks. Everybody’s kicks, man!”

— Jack Kerouac

324. “She talks with a broken heart – Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it’s almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn’t even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess...”

— Jack Kerouac

325. “What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just go along. I dig life.”

— Jack Kerouac

326. “Is Virgin you trying to fathom me.”

— Jack Kerouac

327. “I see as much as doors’ll allow, open or shut.”

— Jack Kerouac

328. “They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.”

— Jack Kerouac

329. “The whole universe was crazy and cock-eyed and extremely strange.”

— Jack Kerouac

330. “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

331. “My philosophy is that you can’t explain the world. It’s too big and it’s too crazy and sometimes it’s funny and most of the time it’s... strange.”

— Jack Kerouac

332. “Mudface is the mud in your goatface. What would you say if someone was asked the question ‘Does a dog have a Buddha nature?’ and said ‘Woof!”

— Jack Kerouac

333. “With the coming of Dean Moriarity began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.”

— Jack Kerouac

334. “And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.”

— Jack Kerouac

335. “When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!”

— Jack Kerouac

336. “I woke up from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where, because I couldn’t see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive on.”

— Jack Kerouac

337. “When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.”

— Jack Kerouac

338. “Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I’d crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquites and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, til the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows-and still we rolled.”

— Jack Kerouac

339. “Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.”

— Jack Kerouac

340. “Mankind is like dogs, not gods – as long as you don’t get mad they’ll bite you – but stay mad and you’ll never be bitten. Dogs don’t respect humility and sorrow.”

— Jack Kerouac

341. “It’s terrible never to find a father in a world chock-full of fathers of all sorts.”

— Jack Kerouac

342. “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

343. “All over America highschool and college kids thinking ‘Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking’ while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded.”

— Jack Kerouac

344. “One fast move or I’m gone,′ I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can’t learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -.”

— Jack Kerouac

345. “The eyes of hope looking over the flare of the hood into the maw with its white line feeding in straight as an arrow, the lighting of fresh cigarettes, the buckling to lean forward to the next adventure something that’s been going on in America ever since the covered wagons clocked the deserts in three months flat –.”

— Jack Kerouac

346. “I wished Dean and Carlo were there – then I realized they’d be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The.”

— Jack Kerouac

347. “Hopalong Cassidy conducting his great white horse across the traffic;.”

— Jack Kerouac

348. “Details are the Life of Prose.”

— Jack Kerouac

349. “I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.”

— Jack Kerouac

350. “The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It’s a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don’t exist to its satisfaction.”

— Jack Kerouac