Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

403. “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

404. “On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, ‘Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?’ and Bull said, ‘I like it because it’s ugly.”

— Jack Kerouac

405. “Pretty soon... do you realize there’ll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody’ll give up reading in despair-There’ll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they’ll have to have a giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading- Seventy Million Million Kotis! – Whoopee! – Everything is free!”

— Jack Kerouac

406. “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

407. “Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.”

— Jack Kerouac

408. “This is the way I like it, when you get going there’s just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy.”

— Jack Kerouac

409. “What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.”

— Jack Kerouac

410. “Did they know that he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour... this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?”

— Jack Kerouac

411. “I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking up at the splendorous night sky, Avalokitesvara’s ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds.”

— Jack Kerouac

412. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

414. “Actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else.”

— Jack Kerouac

415. “I sat cross-legged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? “What’s going to happen to me up ahead?”

— Jack Kerouac

416. “He had no idea of the impression he was making and cared less... He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he would become; but like any Angel he still had rages and furies...”

— Jack Kerouac

417. “I saw letters he wrote at age 14 before his recent spell of silence: they were perfectly normal and better than average writings, in fact sensitive and better than anything I could have written at 14 when I also was an innocent introverted monster.”

— Jack Kerouac

418. “And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good arm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.”

— Jack Kerouac

419. “And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I’d hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.”

— Jack Kerouac

420. “A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes – the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx.”

— Jack Kerouac

421. “I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity’s true and perfectly empty nature.”

— Jack Kerouac

422. “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

423. “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

424. “Once upon a time there’d been a blue-eyed sea captain dining in here.”

— Jack Kerouac

425. “Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I’d realize what there is, is ecstasy.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

427. “She is giving me my life back and not claiming it for herself as so many of the women you love do claim.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

429. “To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.”

— Jack Kerouac

430. “And I saw how everybody dies and nobody’s going to care. I felt how it is to live just so you can die like a bull trapped in a screaming human ring.”

— Jack Kerouac

431. “He doesn’t need any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.”

— Jack Kerouac

432. “A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you’re not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you’re not interested or even involved.”

— Jack Kerouac

433. “We understood each other on other levels of madness.”

— Jack Kerouac

434. “Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.”

— Jack Kerouac

435. “Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it’s actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don’t you see that? By itself it’s a no-thing, it’s really mental, it’s seen only of your mind. In other words it’s empty and awake.”

— Jack Kerouac

436. “At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.”

— Jack Kerouac

437. “Smith, you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.′ The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.”

— Jack Kerouac

438. “There was something virile in her attitude toward tragedy, as though she were defying God to knock off the chip He Himself had placed on her shoulder.”

— Jack Kerouac

439. “I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”

— Jack Kerouac

440. “An art dies when it describes itself instead of life – when it turns from the expression of man’s feelings in the void, to a mere description of the void.”

— Jack Kerouac

441. “This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.”

— Jack Kerouac

442. “I wanted to know what ‘IT’ meant. ‘Ah well’ – Dean laughed – ’now you’re asking me impon-de-rables – ahem!”

— Jack Kerouac

443. “If you keep this up you’ll both go crazy, but let me know what happens as you go along.”

— Jack Kerouac

444. “Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God.”

— Jack Kerouac

445. “Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?”

— Jack Kerouac

446. “We’ve got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.”

— Jack Kerouac

447. “Dear Sirs: Do you mind if I let my heart out, splattering all its delicate essences over these following pages?”

— Jack Kerouac

448. “The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down.”

— Jack Kerouac

449. “You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything.”

— Jack Kerouac

450. “I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields...”

— Jack Kerouac