Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Novelist, Poet

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet, best known for his seminal work 'On the Road', which captures the spirit of the Beat Generation.

Wisdom Thinking Writing Men Dream Girl
Born
March 12, 1922
Died
October 21, 1969
Quotes
460
Rank
#173

Quote collection

Jack Kerouac quotes (page 19 of 23)

460 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world."

Beautiful Eye New Orleans
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"...and performing our one and noble function of the time, move."

Moving Noble Function
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"and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?"

Bears Knows
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"I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream"

Mother Dream Sweet
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"Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live."

Promise Prison
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"Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?"

Gratitude Honesty Believe
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"...[the photographer] can be considered a kind of disembodied burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers. His work, print after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens all... Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse."

Eye Age Hammers
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"I'd rather be thin than famous but I'm fat paste that in your broadway show"

Broadway Fats Shows
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"At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night."

Night Light White
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"And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once."

Air Blue Mountain
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"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."

Real Talking Intellectual
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"The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be "supervised.""

Nice Sleep Vision
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"Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another."

Lying Lunch People
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"You don't know what to say to me because the kingdom is within...flesh and blood's dream...so you fly now, pay later, all of us...I mean actually it's PAY NOW, FLY LATER"

Dream Mean Blood
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"And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void."

Men Doors Feet
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"As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing."

Knowing Perfect Pioneers
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"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."

Writing Men Energy
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"Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream."

Dream Men People
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"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."

Tonight World Causes
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"Mainly I've been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As I'm writing this, the radio says there's a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now."

Nice Book Fall
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