"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."
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Jack Kerouac quotes (page 5 of 23)
460 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
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"I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being."
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"But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things."
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"Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away."
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"Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub."
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"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."
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"All of life is a foreign country."
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"All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road."
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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."
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"You aren't ever going to be anything in this world unless you do what you want to do, when you want to do it--don't plan anything, just go out and do it."
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"Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone."
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"When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!"
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"Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken."
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"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?"
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"Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume."
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"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."
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"And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!"
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