Jack Kerouac famous quotes

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Kindness #Practice #Heaven

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that ***** mountain
-- Jack Kerouac

#Motivational #Wisdom #Office

I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Silly #Want #Belief

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
-- Jack Kerouac

#I Hate You #Glowing #Pages

No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
-- Jack Kerouac

#Dignity #Language #No Fear

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Travel #Stars

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inspirational #Life #Dream

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Goodbye #Travel #Crazy

colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Stars #School #Dark

I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Leaving #World

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Life #Wisdom #Writing

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Suicide #Beer #Catholic

I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I'll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone's lapel and make them confess to me and to all.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Giving Up #Yelling

Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Baby #Mean #Heaven

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Life #Girl #Wisdom

all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Country #Night #Disappear

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Failure #Passion

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inspirational #Friends #Horse

Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind [it] is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Thinking #Essence #Forever

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Phones #People

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Beautiful #Hipster #Crazy

Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Cat #Moon #Purring

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Spiritual #Wisdom #Real

All of life is a foreign country.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Life #Country #Travel

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Silence #Findings

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Men #Giving

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Ink #Life Worth Living #Pens

You can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go.
-- Jack Kerouac

#World #This World

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Travel #Inspire

I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Death #Fall #Ignorance

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.
-- Jack Kerouac

#World

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
-- Jack Kerouac

#Night #America #Car

Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inspirational #Life #Birthday

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Girl #Sex #Real

Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH...
-- Jack Kerouac

#Love #Life #Girl

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Want #Panic

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inspirational #Stories #True Story

Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Talking #Joy #Soul

It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Writing #Way

It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Girl #Believe #Angel

Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Girl #Wisdom #Drinking

Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Dream #Silence #World

The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Space #Blue

There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Travel

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Believe #Angel

don't stop to think of the words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better-and let your mind off yourself in this work.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Thinking #Mind

My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, 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

#Wisdom #Eye #Mad

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition,
-- Jack Kerouac

#Inhibitions

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Moving #Confusion #Leaving

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Mean #Dust #World

The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Long #Pages

Something that you feel will find its own form.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Writing #Form #Feels

Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Mind #Flesh

because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...
-- Jack Kerouac

#Travel #Stars #Tired

Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running -- that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach....
-- Jack Kerouac

#Running #Beach #Wine

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Sunset #Purple #Color

Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...
-- Jack Kerouac

#Oil #Hair #Car

The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Dream #Night #Ties

I think it's a lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Thinking #Lovely #Hallucinations

The taste of rain -- Why kneel?
-- Jack Kerouac

#Rain #Taste

my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Karma #Fun #Believe

My shoes are clean from walking in the rain.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Rain #Shoes #Walking In The Rain

Ray, what you got to do is go climb a mountain...
-- Jack Kerouac

#Mountain #Rays #Climbs

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

#Dream #Memories #Mind

She talks with a broken heart - Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it's almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn't even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder I guess...
-- Jack Kerouac

#Heart #Men #Las Vegas

Pain or love or danger makes you real again....
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Pain #Real

Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they're seeing now, what we'll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Writing #Night #Giving

I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Children #Stories

And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Beautiful #Stars #Moon

My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Eye #Tears

But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wind #Sea #Matter

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

#Life #Stars #Philosophy

The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Joy #Serenity #Tea

Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Autumn #Leafs #Stem

It'll take you eternities to get rid of me,' she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I'll never get rid of her - I wanta be chased till eternity till I catch her.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Jealous #Add #Want

I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Race #Guilty

In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Winter #Medicine #Age

You'd be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Yesterday #Littles

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.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Stars #Thinking #Night

Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Fall #Jumping #Sound

The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Home #October #Going Home

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
-- Jack Kerouac

#Notebook #Joy #Secret

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Peace #Kindness

Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Lonely #California #Land

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wall #Oakland #Cities

As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Drunk #Rooms

I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Sleep #Interesting

The road must eventually lead to the whole world.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Travel #World

It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Winning #Spirit #Humans

The beauty of things must be that they end.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Ends

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Dream #Wisdom #Art

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Lying #Matter #Harvard

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.
-- Jack Kerouac

#People #Mad

On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Wisdom #Stars #Spring

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).
-- Jack Kerouac

#Dream

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.
-- Jack Kerouac

#People #Bitterness #Fierce

It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Girl #Forever #Vision

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.
-- Jack Kerouac

#Dark #Sky #People