Quotes by Jack Kerouac

...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.

It starts raining harder, Ive got a long way to go walking and pushing that sore leg right along in the gathering rain, no chance no intention whatever of hailing a cab, the whiskey and the Morphine have made me unruffled by the sickness of the poison in my heart.

All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkards train to Westchester---but without hangovers.

My eyes were glued on lifeand they were full of tears.

Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just cant fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are happy, O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of happy nuts. (p. 200)

And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing...Page 100.

The tasteof rain-- Why kneel?

It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.

Snap your fingerstop the world - rain falls harder

Smith, you dont realize its a privilege to practice giving presents to others. The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.

...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...

The earth will always be the same - only cities and history will change, even nations will change, governments and governors will go, the things made by mens hands will go, buildings will always crumble - only the earth will remain the same, there will always be men on the earth in the morning, there will always be the things made by Gods hands - and all this history of cities and congress now will go, all modern history is only a littering Babylon smoking under the sun, delaying the day when men again will have to return to earth, to the earth of life and God -

Buds in the snow—the deadly fightbetween two birds

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the grounds frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June-- Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers--they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night.

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

the road is life

At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.