Jack Kerouac Quotes

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

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.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind [it] is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

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

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.

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.

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

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

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

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

It's all too much and not enough at the same time.

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.

But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind'll blow it back.

I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.

The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

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

John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'

Night is longer than day for those who dream & day is longer than night for those who make their dreams comes true.

But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

Contrary to the general belief about photography, you don't need bright sunlight: the best moodiest pictures are taken in the dim light of almost dusk, or of rainy days.

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

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 and thinking 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 wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.

The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

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

Something great is about to happen to me: I'm about to love somebody very much.

No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge.

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.

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.

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.

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.

listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot

Rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything

What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?

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

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks dont see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.

If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong.