Jack Kerouac Quotes

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.

I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

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

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.

Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.

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

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.

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with ‘On the Road’ and ‘The Dharma Bums’, I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

Notoriety and public confession in the literary form is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.

I came to a point where I needed solitude and 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.

While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light

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?

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.

Symbolism is alright in ‘fiction,’ but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.