Quotes by Jack Kerouac

“Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, Fear life, but dont die; youre alone, everybodys alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you cant win, you cant lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.”

“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.”

“...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass 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 is 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...”

“...and everything is going to the beat - Its the beat generation, it be-at, its the beat to keep, its the beat of the heart, its being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...”

“It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.”

“Everybody was yelling Go! Go! Go! (like a jam session),”

“You cant teach the old maestro a new tune.”

“The beat generation”

“[His friend, novelist Jack Kerouac, was in the audience of about 150 at the performance.] Scores of people stood around the darkened gallery straining to hear every word, ... Everyone was yelling, Go! Go! Go! ”

“Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”

“Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.”

“I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad youre alive to see?”

“Mainly Ive been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As Im writing this, the radio says theres a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now.”

“Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.”

“Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.”

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

“Accept loss forever.”

“All of life is a foreign country.”

“Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you dont get mad theyll bite you - but stay mad and youll never be bitten. Dogs dont respect humility and sorrow.”