Jack Kerouac Quotes
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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.
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I'm really Wallace Beery in 'The Champ.'
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I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with 'Beat'… the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the 'avatar' of all this.
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I don't really go out at all.
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Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
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You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.
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It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
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Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
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I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters.
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All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
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As you get older, you get more... genealogical.
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My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.
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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... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.
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Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.
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At one point the driver said, 'For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there.' Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
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John Clellon Holmes … and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'
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Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
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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.
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Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.
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Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world
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'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.'
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Be in love with your life every detail of it
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There's your Karma ripe as peaches.
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I know who the great poets are.