Jack Kerouac

“The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.”

“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 don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone”

“I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.”

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

“The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.”

“I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

“I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.”

“As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit it, or tell it when we meet, but don’t expect me to get excited by anything anymore.”

“When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.”

“The unspeakable visions of the individual.”

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

“If you own a rug you own too much.”

“But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.”

“Something that you feel will find its own form.”

“The secret of this kind of climbing, is like Zen. Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you don't hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like zen.~ Japhy”

“If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?”

“I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.”

“Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda philosophy or social system that puts down sex said Japhy (Gary Snyder)”

“His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she was absolutely the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all our lives. She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds, living curls of them. She blushed and blushed... 'Oh a girl like that scares me,' I said. 'I'd give up everything and throw myself on her mercy and if she didn't want me I'd just as simply go and throw myself off the edge of the world'.”

“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, stabilized-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, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness.”

“Era triste ver cómo su elevada figura se perdía en la oscuridad mientras nos alejábamos, lo mismo que había pasado con las otras figuras de Nueva York y Nueva Orleans: se las veía inseguras bajo los inmensos cielos y todo lo que les rodeaba sumergido en la negrura. ¿Adónde ir? ¿Qué hacer?¿Para qué hacerlo...? Dormir. Pero nuestro grupo de locos se lanzaba hacia delante. [pp. 197]”

“¿Qué será de nosotros cuando muramos?- Le pregunte en cierta ocasión.- Cuando uno se muere se muere, eso es todo - respondió.”

“Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain.”

“...the great black bird broods outside my window in the high dark night waiting to enfold me when I leave the house tomorrow only I'm going to dodge it successfully by sheer animalism and ability and even exhilaration, so goodnight”

“and the stars were icicles of mockery”

“In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood”

“Who doesn't feel studious when he doesn't have a girl with a Riviera suntan?”

“There are worse things than being mad.”

“Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”

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

“Man, wow, there's 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 didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.”

“Pero entonces bailaban por las calles como peonzas enloquecidas, y yo vacilaba tras ellos como he estado haciendo toda mi vida mientras sigo a la gente que me interesa, porque la única gente que me interesa está loca, la gente que está loca por vivir, loca por hablar, loca por salvarse, con ganas de todo al mismo tiempo, la gente que nunca bosteza ni habla de lugares comunes, sino que arde, arde como fabulosos cohetes amarillos explotando igual que arañas entre las estrellas y entonces se ve estallar una luz azul y todo el mundo suelta un <>. [pp. 16]”

“I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream”

“It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.”

“...we all must admit that everything is fine and there's no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we're not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.”

“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they are thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there- and all the time they’ll get there any way, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end”

“Life is life, and kind is kind”

“And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.”

“Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?”

“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--across the night...”

“Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.''Where we going, man?''I don't know but we gotta go.”

“Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are still pretty glorious. ”

“I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third) asked me for dimes in the dawn.”

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

“That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor.”

“Japhy,' I said out loud, 'I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned it all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.' Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said 'God I love you' and looked up to the sky and really meant it. 'I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.'To the children and the innocent it's all the same.And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said 'Thank you, shack.' Then I hadded 'Blah,' with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.”