Quotes by Jack Kerouac

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

the golden eternity is { }

Aw I dont wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys....But youll miss all that, just for some old wine.Theres wisdom in wine, goddam it! I yelled. Have a shot!

Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—thats the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you cant hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, thats all.

And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but Id hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.

Love is bitter, death is sweet.

They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.

Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just dont know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone

Dont use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.

Id rather be thin than famousbut Im fatpaste that in your broadway show

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If youre not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, youre not interested or even involved.

Man, wow, theres so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

Hell man, I know very well you didnt come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that youve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

What is the universe but a lot of wavesAnd a craving desire is a wave…