110+ Jack Kerouac Quotes On Road, Death And Writing

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, poet, and artist from Lowell, Massachusetts. He is best known for his novel On the Road, which became an American classic and a major influence on the Beat Generation. His spontaneous and experimental writing style, combined with his exploration of American culture, made him a major figure in the post-war literary world. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jack Kerouac on love, road, death.

Top 10 Jack Kerouac Quotes

1. Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain
2. Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
3. My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
4. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
5. I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
6. Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.
7. It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
8. 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.
9. Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.
10. And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.

Jack Kerouac Image Quotes

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

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

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

Jack Kerouac Short Quotes

• The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.
• The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
• Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.
• listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot
• I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!
• If you tell a true story, you can't be wrong.
• It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night.
• It's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies
• and the stars were icicles of mockery
• While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Love

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

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

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

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. — Jack Kerouac

Pain or love or danger makes you real again. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

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? — Jack Kerouac

The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Road

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

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

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

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. — Jack Kerouac

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

How I wished I'd have had a camera of my own, a mad mental camera that could register pictorial shots, of the photographic artist himself prowling about for his ultimate shot - an epic in itself. (On the road with Robert Frank, 1958) — Jack Kerouac

What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how? — Jack Kerouac

For life is holy and every moment is precious. — Jack Kerouac

..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was — Jack Kerouac

Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.' 'Where we going, man?' 'I don't know but we gotta go. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Death

I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. — Jack Kerouac

I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death. — Jack Kerouac

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death. — Jack Kerouac

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? — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Writing

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

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. — Jack Kerouac

I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours — Jack Kerouac

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings. — Jack Kerouac

It ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it. — Jack Kerouac

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself. — Jack Kerouac

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. — Jack Kerouac

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America. — Jack Kerouac

Details are the Life of Prose. — Jack Kerouac

Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Life

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. — Jack Kerouac

Because the only people for me are the mad ones. — Jack Kerouac

My life is a vast inconsequential epic. — Jack Kerouac

All of life is a foreign country. — Jack Kerouac

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

Return those shoes to the shoemaker Return this hand to my father This pillow to the pillowmaker Those slippers to the shop. That wainscot to the carpenter, But my mind my tranquil and eternal Mind Return it to whom? — Jack Kerouac

I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing. — Jack Kerouac

Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields. — Jack Kerouac

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

I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Nature

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all — Jack Kerouac

Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off. — Jack Kerouac

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. — Jack Kerouac

The Four Inevitabilities: 1. Musty Books. 2. Uninteresting Nature. 3. Dull Existence. 4. Blank Nirvana, buy that boy. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Friends

We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. — Jack Kerouac

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love. — Jack Kerouac

His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line. — Jack Kerouac

But there's no joy at all, people say "Oh well he's drunk and happy let him sleep it off"--The poor drunkard is *crying*--He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he's crying for help. (p.111) — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About America

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night? — Jack Kerouac

my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom. — Jack Kerouac

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America. — Jack Kerouac

It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes. — Jack Kerouac

We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night. — Jack Kerouac

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. — Jack Kerouac

We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell — Jack Kerouac

Here I was at the end of America...no more land...and nowhere was nowhere to go but back — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Beat

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!' — Jack Kerouac

I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this. — Jack Kerouac

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

The beat generation (coined in Playboy) — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About People

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. — Jack Kerouac

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

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-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. — Jack Kerouac

One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they've been doing they weren't sure it was right - lambies all over the world. — Jack Kerouac

The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter. — Jack Kerouac

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

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. — Jack Kerouac

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream. — Jack Kerouac

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200) — Jack Kerouac

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Live

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

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. — Jack Kerouac

Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy. — Jack Kerouac

So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines. — Jack Kerouac

Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I'll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already. — Jack Kerouac

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear? — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to 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... — Jack Kerouac

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes About Talk

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

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. — Jack Kerouac

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... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles. — Jack Kerouac

A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street. — Jack Kerouac

There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go. — Jack Kerouac

Never mistake talking about writing for actual writing. — Jack Kerouac

I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters. — Jack Kerouac

In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals. — Jack Kerouac

We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out. — Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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? — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

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 — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing. — Jack Kerouac

I have the right ideas, but my words are too... complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. — Jack Kerouac

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. — Jack Kerouac

Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it. — Jack Kerouac

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

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. — Jack Kerouac

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

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

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. — Jack Kerouac

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

The only truth is music. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

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

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

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

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks! — Jack Kerouac

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

My shoes are clean from walking in the rain. — Jack Kerouac

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being. — Jack Kerouac

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. — Jack Kerouac

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

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

Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed. — Jack Kerouac

I suddenly discovered the delight of rebellion. — Jack Kerouac

It all ends in tears anyway. — Jack Kerouac

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

Desolation, desolation, I owe so much to desolation. — Jack Kerouac

I rather like the idea of having all my hours to myself: eating a Fudge Sundae, watching a movie, sleeping on my couch, singing in the bathroom, studying the woods, kidding around with a girl, playing cards lazily - all kinds of stuff that American brands 'shiftless.' — Jack Kerouac

The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream. — Jack Kerouac

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

Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148) — Jack Kerouac

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities. — Jack Kerouac

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls. — Jack Kerouac

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

I think it's all lovely hallucination but I love it sorta. — Jack Kerouac

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

At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will. — Jack Kerouac

My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. — Jack Kerouac

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301). — Jack Kerouac

Life Lessons by Jack Kerouac

1. Jack Kerouac's writing emphasizes the importance of living in the moment and embracing the beauty of life's journey.
2. His work encourages readers to be open and accepting of different cultures, beliefs and experiences.
3. He also highlights the importance of being true to oneself and taking risks in order to find true happiness.