"As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind."
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Quote collection
Jack Kerouac quotes (page 11 of 23)
460 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared."
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"And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?"
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"It is possible for the human spirit to win after all."
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"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy"
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"Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that."
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"Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child."
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"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."
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"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all"
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"All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers."
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"I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other."
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"and silence is the golden mountain"
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"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!"
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"Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall."
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"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."
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"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."
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"I want a blaze of light to flame in me forever in a timeless, dear love of everything. And why should I pretend to want anything else?"
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"Pretty girls make graves"
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"Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition."
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"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."
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