Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

353. “I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who’d kill anybody who said something against his mother.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

355. “And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.”

— Jack Kerouac

356. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “God who is everything possesses the eye of awakening, like dreaming a long dream of an impossible task.”

— Jack Kerouac

364. “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

365. “I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.”

— Jack Kerouac

366. “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

367. “The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.”

— Jack Kerouac

368. “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

369. “Details are the Life of Prose.”

— Jack Kerouac

370. “What does it matter? Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgements and pray for the light.”

— Jack Kerouac

371. “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

372. “They build their own Hells.”

— Jack Kerouac

373. “Eager for bread and love.”

— Jack Kerouac

374. “Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don’t dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they’re angels.”

— Jack Kerouac

375. “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

377. “I don’t want to be courageous, my emotions are against it; I want to be happy.”

— Jack Kerouac

378. “Papier-mache canals flowed in downtown Lowell, men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect the drizzle hopelessness of 1926.”

— Jack Kerouac

379. “To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed.”

— Jack Kerouac

380. “The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled – Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.”

— Jack Kerouac

381. “I felt like telling Japhy everything I thought but I knew it didn’t matter and moreover he knew it anyway and silence is the golden mountain.”

— Jack Kerouac

382. “As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.”

— Jack Kerouac

383. “Who doesn’t feel studious when he doesn’t have a girl with a Riviera suntan?”

— Jack Kerouac

384. “What difference does it make after all? For what’s heaven? What’s Earth? All in the mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

385. “It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.”

— Jack Kerouac

386. “Absolutely no way to escape enigmans.”

— Jack Kerouac

387. “Ah the mad hearts of all of us.”

— Jack Kerouac

388. “Books, shmooks, this sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this I’ll gladly become a millworker and shut my big mouth.”

— Jack Kerouac

389. “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by.”

— Jack Kerouac

390. “Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called ‘pretentious’ by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”

— Jack Kerouac

391. “By the time I went to bed I wasn’t taken in by no Princess or no desire for no Princess and nobody’s disapproval and I felt glad and slept well.”

— Jack Kerouac

392. “O love, fled me – or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night?”

— Jack Kerouac

393. “I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was ‘Wow!”

— Jack Kerouac

394. “I’d rather walk than ride the airplane, I can fall on the ground flat on my face and die that way.”

— Jack Kerouac

395. “And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ’cause now is the time and we all know time!”

— Jack Kerouac

396. “I suddenly realized it was fall and that I was going back to New York.”

— Jack Kerouac

397. “And all you hearts who love life realize now that to love is to love-.”

— Jack Kerouac

398. “Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

— Jack Kerouac

399. “Her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse.”

— Jack Kerouac

400. “A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street...”

— Jack Kerouac