Jack Kerouac

“- Dobbiamo andare e non fermarci finché non siamo arrivati.- Dove andiamo?- Non lo so, ma dobbiamo andare.”

“C'è sempre qualcosa di più, un po' più in là... non finisce mai.”

“I'm the golden eternity in mortal animate form.”

“I go to bed with horror on my wings. In my pillow is sad comforts. Like my mother says, 'On essaye a s'y prendre, pi sa travaille pas' (We try to manage, and it turns out shit).”

“Nulla dietro di me, tutto avanti, è sempre così sulla strada...”

“Non lo so, non importa e non fa nessuna differenza.”

“Un dolore mi trafisse il cuore, come succedeva ogni volta che vedevo una ragazza che mi piaceva andarsene in direzione opposta alla mia in questo mondo troppo grande.”

“Sembra che io abbia una costituzione che non regge l'alcol e ancor di meno l'idiozia e l'incoerenza.”

“And it's finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for "cities" at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings'll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillnes in the wilds- So I tell myself "Be Wise.”

“I could hear and indescribable seething roar which wasn't which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realised that I had died and reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly eas, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.I realised it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein, like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled.I thought I was going to die the very next moment.”

“I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion”

“It's hard to explain and best thing to do is not be false.”

“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.”

“You're a Genius all the time”

“Believe in the holy contour of life”

“Be in love with yr life”

“You guys are going somewhere or just going?”

“I wanta go to Tangiers, I want girls, Iwanta write the biggest book in the world,I want spring to come, I want, I want--Wanting, I get; getting, I lose; losing, Isuffer; suffering, I die--NOT WANTING, I DON'T GETNOT GETTING, I DON'T LOSENOT LOSING, I DON'T SUFFERNOT SUFFERING, I DON'T DIE SUFFERING.”

“I am an appearanceThe world is an appearanceThe bread I eat is an appearanceAll wish't forth from Mind EssenceDue to Ignorance--I don't have to existI don't exist, I do exist--Who cares?For the purposes of this worldDo nothingOr do everything anyhow.”

“Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact 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 middle-class 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 dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. 'All these people,' said Japhy, 'they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.' He had a million ideas, he had 'em all.”

“The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”

“You know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.”

“...both of us had a lot to say, but there was no room to say it in, we were so tense and close.”

“It's impossible to fall of mountains you fool!”

“I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.”

“Esos hijo putas han inventado unos plásticos con los que podrían hacer casas que duraran para siempre. Y neumáticos. Los americanos mueren anualmente por millares debido a neumáticos defectuosos que se calientan en la carretera y revientan. Podrían fabricar neumáticos que nunca reventaran. Y lo mismo pasas con la pasta de dientes. Hay un chicle que han ivnentado y no quieren que se sepa porque si lo masticas de niño no tendrás caries en toda tu vida. Y lo mismo la ropa. Pueden fabricar ropa que dure para siempre. Prefieren hacer productos baratos ay así todo el mundo tiene que seguir trabajando y fichando y organizándose en siniestros sindicatos y andar dando tumbos mientras las grandes tajadas se las llevan en Washington y Moscú.”

“Be in love with your life, every detail of it.”

“Eдинствените хора за мен са лудите, онези, които са луди за живот, луди за разговори, луди за спасение, онези, които пожелават всичко наведнъж, които никога не се прозяват, нито дрънкат баналности, а горят, горят, горят като приказни жълти фойерверки, разпукват се сред небето, същински звездни паяци, а отвътре блясва синкавата светлина на сърцевината им и тогава всички се стъписват.”

“i love, love.”

“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 back. Of all the girls in there she needed the money most; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little infant/ sisters and brothers. It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money. I have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her made me flinch. In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach. Strange that Neal and Frank also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that. At one point I saw Neal leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.”

“a traveling epic Hunkey, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer and only because he has no place he can stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, and keep rolling under the stars”

“It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”

“I felt free and therefore I was free.”

“This is a thing which astonishes me no end, but affects you not.”

“Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream––grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.”

“All my other current friends were "intellectuals"––Chad the Nietzschean anthropologist, Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and his critical anti-everything drawl––or else they were slinking criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the New Yorker. But Dean's intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his "criminality" was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming. Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn't care one way or the other.”

“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”

“You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.”

“but I should have known from her original announcement of independence to believe in the sincerity of her distaste for involvement, instead hurling on at her as if and because in fact I wanted to be hurt and 'lacerate' myself”

“I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us”

“... this girl I was SEEKING to get involved with as if not enough trouble already or other old romances hadn't taught me that message of pain, keep asking for it, for life”

“ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you”

“(difficult to make a real confession and show what happened when you're such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big sole details about others go sitting and waiting around)”

“Is Virgin you trying to fathom me”

“I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it.”

“Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet?”

“Texas is undeniable...We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest.”

“Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the word and would raise mean's souls to joy.”

“I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, 'There ain't nothin left after that.”

“Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.”