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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Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
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All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.
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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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Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
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You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.
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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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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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As you get older, you get more... genealogical.
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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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You can't fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name.
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No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.
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Be in love with your life every detail of it
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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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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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I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.
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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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Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world
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We should be wondering tonight, 'Is there a world?' But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.
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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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Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.
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Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.