Quotes By Author: Jack Kerouac
“They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. – I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech – inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.”
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“And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!”
“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.”
“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…”
“A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you’re not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you’re not interested or even involved.”
“I’d rather be thin than famousbut I’m fatpaste that in your broadway show”
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
“And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I’d hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.”
“Aw I don’t wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.’…But you’ll miss all that, just for some old wine.’There’s wisdom in wine, goddam it!’ I yelled. ‘Have a shot!”
“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can’t hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that’s all.”
“After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.”
“the golden eternity is { }”
“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”