Jack Kerouac Quotes

and the stars were icicles of mockery

Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.

Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.

My life is a vast inconsequential epic.

The only truth is music.

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

I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.

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.

I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.

Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.

But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.

I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.

On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.

All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.

All of life is a foreign country.

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

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

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?

When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!

Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.

You aren't ever going to be anything in this world unless you do what you want to do, when you want to do it--don't plan anything, just go out and do it.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

You'd be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday

Don't drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

You are the equal of the idol who has given you your inspiration

I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die yelling & laughing.

The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.

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

It all ends in tears anyway.

Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.

Believe in the holy contour of life.

Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.

Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.

Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation.

I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.

Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.

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