Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “They build their own Hells.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

353. “Eager for bread and love.”

— Jack Kerouac

354. “We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.”

— Jack Kerouac

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

358. “Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize “The stars are words” and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind. There’s no need for solitude. So love life for what it is, and form no preconceptions whatever in your mind.”

— Jack Kerouac

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

362. “Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what’s coming next except that you’re burning the road to outrun it.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

365. “Absolutely no way to escape enigmans.”

— Jack Kerouac

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

371. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

375. “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

376. “I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

381. “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

382. “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

383. “Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.”

— Jack Kerouac

384. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

386. “There are immeasurable star misty aeons of universes more numerous than the sands in all the galaxies, multiplied by a billion lightyears of multiplication, in fact if I were to go on you’d be scared and couldn’t comprehend and you’d despair so much you’d drop dead,′ that’s what he just about said in one of those sutras – -.”

— 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. “Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.”

— Jack Kerouac

389. “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

390. “I’d better be a poet Or lay down dead.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— 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. “Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon...”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

395. “Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the word and would raise mean’s souls to joy.”

— Jack Kerouac

396. “Hell man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.”

— Jack Kerouac

397. “Go Moan for Man.”

— Jack Kerouac

398. “I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.”

— Jack Kerouac

399. “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

400. “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