Jack Kerouac Quotes

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

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

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

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

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?

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

…the tale that’s told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that’s told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.

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

If you own a rug you own too much.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

I’d better be a poet Or lay down dead.

You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday