Quotes by Jack Kerouac

You boys going to get somewhere, or just going? We didnt understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

I fear mostly my inability to capture all the things that come, I fear their mysterious source, I fear their fate, I fear me, in short. This is true…it’s like finding a river of gold when you haven’t even got a cup to save a cupful…you’ve but a thimble, and that thimble is your pathetic brain and labour and humanness.

Is Virgin you trying to fathom me

Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - 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 in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.

I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’spractically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, ofcourse.

And I said, That last thing is what you cant get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!

and rain will fall on our eaves.

Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live Ill have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already.

I dont think anybodyd remember and certainly do know everybodyd lie. The reason Im so bitter and, as I said, in anguish, nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybodys begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course Ive forgotten some...)I do believe that lying is a sin, unless its innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar......like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when theyre only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...

And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.

You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what Im expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When youre young you wanta cry, when youre old you wanta die. But thats too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse

I clearly saw the skeleton underneathall this show of personalitywhat is left of a manand all his pride but bones?

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. Look, he said. Youre a fish in a pond. Its drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everythings going to be all right.

I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.

This is the story of America. Everybodys doing what they think theyre supposed to do.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the starsll be out, and dont you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows whats going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. IN the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess.