Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.”

— Jack Kerouac

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

362. “I had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, as I realized when we got back into the house and I saw the Christmas tree, the presents, and smelled the roasting turkey and listened to the talk of the relatives, but now the bug was on me again, and the bug’s name was Dean Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

365. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

367. “I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.”

— Jack Kerouac

368. “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

369. “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

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. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

378. “Some people have vibrations that come straight from the vibrating heart of the sun, unjaded...”

— Jack Kerouac

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

382. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

384. “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

385. “Eager for bread and love.”

— Jack Kerouac

386. “Details are the Life of Prose.”

— Jack Kerouac

387. “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

388. “They build their own Hells.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

390. “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

391. “The old tree brooded over me silently, a living thing. I heard a mouse snoring in the garden weeds. The rooftops of Berkeley looked like pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the enternality of the heavens which they feared to face. 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. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

394. “One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.”

— Jack Kerouac

395. “O hell, I’m sick of life – If I had any guts I’d drown myself in that tiresome water but that wouldn’t be getting it over at all, I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up in some other wretched suffering form eternities of it – I guess that’s what the kid feels – She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.”

— Jack Kerouac

396. “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

397. “She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

399. “If you can’t boogie I know I’ll show you how.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac