Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “I’d rather walk than ride the airplane, I can fall on the ground flat on my face and die that way.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

403. “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

404. “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

405. “Absolutely no way to escape enigmans.”

— Jack Kerouac

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “Go Moan for Man.”

— Jack Kerouac

423. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

425. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind.”

— Jack Kerouac

433. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

435. “I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”

— Jack Kerouac

436. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

438. “Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.”

— Jack Kerouac

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

443. “I cried for it. That’s how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.”

— Jack Kerouac

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

448. “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

449. “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

450. “I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.”

— Jack Kerouac