Top 500 Jack Kerouac Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

403. “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

404. “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

405. “For when destruction comes to the world of “history” and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.”

— Jack Kerouac

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

410. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

412. “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

413. “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

414. “Absolutely no way to escape enigmans.”

— Jack Kerouac

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

418. “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

419. “Go Moan for Man.”

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

421. “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

422. “The mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico – which was now something else in my mind – was like recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once.”

— Jack Kerouac

423. “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

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

— 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. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

430. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

433. “Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.”

— Jack Kerouac

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

438. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Jack Kerouac

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

— Jack Kerouac

446. “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

447. “Trouble is, what would I do with her once I won her?- it’s like winning an angel in hell and you are then entitled to go down with her to where it’s worse or maybe there’ll be light, some, down there, maybe it’s me’s crazy-.”

— Jack Kerouac

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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