Jack Kerouac Quotes

And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes...

And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of...

Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the...

Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being (195).

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,...

But let a perpetual smileof peace and satisfactionOn your lipsBe a symbol of the decision To think happiness (equanimity)Since everything that happensHappens in your head

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...

Does this mean that frontiers from now on are to be in the imagination?

Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.

Don’t you have a class this morning, Georgie?Day mumbled something that sounded likeAncient History of the Near East and Greece.Poof! scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,Come with me and see the Ne...

Dreaming: the phantom of self-illusion emanating visions that change every nightLiving: the phantom of universal self-illusion emanating the huge vision of the world that takes millenniums to change

Dreams were so irrational, so gray with a nameless terror . . . and yet, too, so haunting and beautiful.

For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.

Gus was looking at him for confirmation of all his sorrows.

He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he coul...

I couldn’t take my eyes off the little dark girl and the way, like a queen, she walked around and was even reduced by the sullen bartender to menial tasks such as bringing us drinks and sweeping the b...

I felt free and therefore I was free.

I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion.

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

What a horror it would have been if the world was real.