Jack Kerouac Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jack Kerouac's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Novelist Jack Kerouac's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 460 quotes on this page collected since March 12, 1922! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt

    Jack Kerouac (1972). “Visions of Cody”, London : André Deutsch
  • One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -

    Book  
  • -no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity.

    Girl   Dream  
    Jack Kerouac (1958). “The Subterraneans”, p.36, Grove Press
  • I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

    Men  
    Jack Kerouac (2000). “Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings”, p.92, Penguin
  • What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

    "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac, (Ch. 8), 1957.
  • Pretty girls make graves

    Girl  
    Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.29, Penguin
  • The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

    Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA
  • As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

    Mind  
    Jack Kerouac (2007). “Satori in Paris and Pic”, p.22, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Pain or love or danger makes you real again.

    Wisdom  
    Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.96, Penguin
  • The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?

    Wisdom   Sweet  
    Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.211, Penguin
  • Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better.

    "Selected letters, 1940-1956".
  • 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.

    "On the Road". Book by Jack Kerouac, Ch. 5, 1957.
  • Something that you feel will find its own form.

    Jack Kerouac (2016). “The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished, & Newly Translated Writings”, p.218, Library of America
  • 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.

    Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.65, Penguin
  • I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.

    Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.118, Penguin
  • I can't think of anybody...who knows the sum and substance of what I know and feel and cry about in my secret self all the time when I don't feel strong, the sorrows of time and personality, and can therefore on all levels make it all the way with me

    Jack Kerouac (1972). “Visions of Cody”, London : André Deutsch
  • 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.

    Mean   Men  
    Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.145, Penguin
  • I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

    Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.168, Penguin
  • Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.

    Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA
  • Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

  • Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.

    Girl   Wisdom  
    Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.183, Penguin
  • You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.

  • And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.

    Jack Kerouac (2012). “Big Sur (Annotated)”, p.28, BookBaby
  • My life is a vast inconsequential epic.

    Jack Kerouac (1995). “Desolation Angels”, Riverhead Trade (Paperbacks)
  • I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.

    Wisdom  
    Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.148, Penguin
  • I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can't go on all the time-- all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.

    Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road”, Viking Press
  • Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?

    William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac (2009). “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks”, p.100, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • I am always thinking 'What am I doing here? Is this the way I am supposed to feel?'

  • I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person — I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? — What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

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

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 460 quotes from the Novelist Jack Kerouac, starting from March 12, 1922! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!