Jack Kerouac

“…the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside?”

“It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.”

“What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.”

“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?”

“What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.”

“It seems to me now that my life is writing, be it only words without meaning...When I am 33 I shall put a bullet straight through me.”

“I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico, or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call "do-nothing".”

“The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity.”

“He doesn't need any money , all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this.”

“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”

“Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.”

“God is an Indian giver who gives only occasionally.”

“The beauty of things must be that they end.”

“We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.”

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”

“What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.”

“Besides which, she would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

“Romanlarımla evlenip, çocuk yerine de kısa hikayeler edineceğim.”

“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 drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers.”

“Go Moan for Man”

“Like Goethe at 80, you know the futility of love and you shrug--you shrug away the warm kiss”

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength”

“barmen, radyoyu açmıştı. bir haber sunucusu bir sirk yangınından bahsediyordu ve şöyle denildiğini işittim: "ve hipopotamlar tanklarında haşlanıp öldüler." bu ayrıntıları radyo spikerlerinin karakteristik tatlı dilli, hevesli üslubuyla anlatıyordu...”

“...because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was "The pathway to wisdom lies through excess”

“But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility.”

“We agreed to love each other madly.”

“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.”

“...notice how he will come to manhood with his own particular soul bespeaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyes surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls.”

“I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.”

“Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.”

“He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT.”

“Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.”

“...besides which Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.”

“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.”

“...most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.”

“all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.”

“She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.”

“I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”

“a choleric, red-faced, pudgy hater of everything, who could turn on the warmest and most charming smile in the world when real life confronted him sweetly in the night.”

“I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far receding hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.”

“and rain will fall on our eaves.”

“Alzo gli occhi, ecco lì le stelle, sempre le stesse, desolazione, e sotto gli angeli che non sanno di essere angeli.E Sarina morirà.Ed io morirò, e voi morirete, e tutti moriremo e persino le stelle si spegneranno una dopo l’altra con l’andar del tempo”

“Perché per me l’unica gente possibile sono i pazzi, quelli che sono pazzi di vita, pazzi per parlare, pazzi per essere salvati, vogliosi di ogni cosa allo stesso tempo, quelli che mai sbadigliano o dicono un luogo comune, ma bruciano, bruciano, bruciano, come favolosi fuochi artificiali color giallo che esplodono come ragni attraverso le stelle e nel mezzo si vede la luce azzurra dello scoppio centrale e tutti fanno Oooohhh”

“It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.”

“Bein Crazyis the least of my worries.”

“Beautiful girlsJust primpBut beautiful boysDo suffer.”

“i've no timeTo dally hasselIn your heart's house,It's too grayI'm too cold-I wanta go to Golden,That's my home.”

“No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

“The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up to the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, its béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown.”