Quotes by Jack Kerouac

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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.

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I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

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There are worse things than being mad.

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At the end I finished blurting "I am too old for that kind of young idealisms, I've already been through all these things! - Must I put up with all this again?"
"But it's authentic, it's the truth!" Simon screams "the world is an infinity enchanted place! It gives everyone love and they will give it back! I have seen it!"
"I know it that it's true but I have enough!"
"But you cannot be tired, if you have enough we have enough, if everybody has enough and is tired, everybody is surrending, and then the world falls in to pieces and dies!"
"And it's so like this that it would have to be!"
"No! There should be the life!"
"It doesn't make difference!"
"Ah my Jacky don't come to say these things to me, life is life and blood and strain and tickles" (and he starts to make me tickles on the ribs in order to demonstrate it to me) "Do you see? You jump, you feel you tickle, you life, you have a vital beauty in the brain and a vital joy in the heart and a vital orgasm in the body, all you have to do is live, Live! Everybody loves to take themselves arm in arm along the walk" from that I understand that he has spoken with Irwin.
"Alas miserable, I am so tired" I am forced to admit.
"No way! Waked up! Be happy! Where do we go now?"

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"I look up, there are the stars, just the same, desolation, and the angels below who don't know they're angels...
And Sarina will die.
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."

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When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on mules and I'm alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro in vain" but instead I'd come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me and many's the time I thought I die, suspire of boredom, or jump off the mountain, but the days, nay the hours dragged and I had no guts for such a leap, I had to wait and get to see the face of reality.

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I have given up attempting to be happy.

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What's that feeling that comes to you when you further away in a car from someone and you see them becoming smaller in the plain 'til they become little spots that vanish? It's the world that too big overwhelms us, it's a Goodbye. But in the meantime it projects itself forward towards a new, wild adventure underneath the sky.

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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. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy. Also around bedtime was my singing time. I'd pace up and down the well-worn path in the dust of my rock singing all the show tunes I could remember, at the top of my voice too, with nobody to hear except the deer and the bear.

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Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.