Kerouac Quotes

“Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac”
― Frank O'Hara

“Something that you feel will find its own form.”
― Jack Kerouac

“He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City

“I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.”
― Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

“Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“What's Your Road, Man?”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.”
― Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli

“November the seventh
The last
Faint cricket”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus

“I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.”
― Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

“Hitch hiked a thousand
miles and brought
You wine”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus

“Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever.”
― Alison Winfield Burns, Ivy League Bohemians (A Girl Among Boys): Bliss Book of Columbia University's Pariah Artists

“...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...

Page 100.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an "urban Thoreau") set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of "work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man

“The other man, just as
lonesome as I am
In this empty universe”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus

“I just love crazy people like this,' Murphy said. 'Jack Kerouac people. Mad to live, mad to die, that kind of thing.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Peaches

“Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Buds in the snow
—the deadly fight
between two birds”
― Jack Kerouac, Book of Haikus

“There ain’t no such thing as lumberjack, that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call ‘em loggers.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Rėjaus maldelė:
"...... (vardas) toks pats tuščias, toks pat mylimas, toks pat būsimas Buda.”
― Kerouac Jack

“But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S.P. alley,
puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of
Marin to the north or San Jose south,
the clarity of Cal to break your heart.
It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do,
ole Frisco with end of land
sadness”
― Jack Kerouac

“At night at my desk in the shack I see the reflection of myself in the black window, a rugged faced man in a dirty ragged shirt, need-a-shave, frowny, lipped, eyed, haired, nosed, eared, handed, necked, adamsappled, eyebrowed, a reflection just with all behind it the void of 7000000000000 light years of infinite darkness riddled by arbitrary limited-idea light, and yet there’s a twinkle in me eye and I sing bawdy songs about the moon in the alleys of Dublin, about vodka hoy hoy, and then sad Mexico sundown-over-rocks songs about amor, corazón, and tequila - My desk is littered with papers, beautiful to look at thru half closed eyes the delicate milky litter of papers piled, like some old dream of a picture of papers, like papers piled on a desk in a cartoon, like a realistic scene from an old Russian film, and the oil lamp shadowing some in half -”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“Sad understanding is what compassion means - I resign from the attempt to be happy. It’s all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you’d only stare into space and in that space though you’d see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory and armors sniffing and miffed on benches of this one-same-ferry-boat to the other shore you’d still be staring into space for form is emptiness, and emptiness is form - O golden eternity, these simperers in your show of things, take them and slave them to your truth that is forever true forever - forgive me my human floppings - I think therefore I die - I think therefore I am born - Let me be void still - Like a happy child lost in a sudden dream and when his buddy addresses him he doesnt hear, his buddy nudges him he doesnt move; finally seeing the purity and truth of his trance the buddy watches in wonder - you can never be that pure again, and jump out of such trances with a happy gleam of love, being an angel in the dream.”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Buddhist and a translator of classic Chinese texts before Kerouac met him. He was the Zen guru of the Beats at the same time that Alan Watts popularized Buddhism for middle-class Americans in best-selling books and magazine articles of the late 1950s. Snyder had studied with Watts for a while but thought him 'square.' 'He was cool in relation to the people around him,' Snyder once said, referring to 'middle class, needy' Americans, but he was 'never actually cool.' Then Snyder added with a wink, '[and] you know what I mean, as the Big Bopper says,' invoking the rock-and-roll classic 'Chantilly Lace' for those hip and in-the-know.”
― Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

“La vita è un viaggio sulla strada, dall’utero fino alla fine della notte, in cui si continua a tendere il cordone d’argento finché non si rompe da qualche parte lungo il cammino.”
― Kerouac, Jack

“So: an epic novel of the Tathagata? Yes, but not a very good one. Kerouac would have done better.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Jack [Kerouac] was, in a sense, a twentieth-century American mythographer. And that’s why maybe those novels will stand up, because they will be one of the best statements of the myth of the twentieth century.”
― Gary Snyder