Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

304. “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

305. “The unspeakable visions of the individual.”

— Jack Kerouac

306. “You boys going to get somewhere, or just going.”

— Jack Kerouac

307. “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

308. “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

309. “It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”

— Jack Kerouac

310. “I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.”

— Jack Kerouac

311. “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

312. “It made me think that everything was about to arrive – the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.”

— Jack Kerouac

313. “The cause of the world’s woe is birth, the cure of the world’s woe is a bent stick.”

— Jack Kerouac

314. “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

316. “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.”

— Jack Kerouac

317. “His friends said, “Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?” and Bull said, “I like it because it’s ugly.” All his life was in that line.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

319. “I like it because its ugly.”

— Jack Kerouac

320. “This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read” – Sal Paradise, On The Road.”

— Jack Kerouac

321. “The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.”

— Jack Kerouac

322. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

325. “Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.”

— Jack Kerouac

326. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

330. “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

331. “Everything fell apart in me. How are things with you?”

— Jack Kerouac

332. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

335. “The cowboy music twanged in the roadhouse and carried across the fields, all sadness. It was all right with me. I kissed my baby and we put out the lights.”

— Jack Kerouac

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

342. “There’s wisdom in wine.”

— Jack Kerouac

343. “Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it’s poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”

— Jack Kerouac

344. “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

345. “Sometimes I’d yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel – “What is the meaning of the void?” The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.”

— Jack Kerouac

346. “If all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without contrasting them, like lights?”

— Jack Kerouac

347. “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

348. “As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.”

— Jack Kerouac

349. “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

350. “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