1,027 Quotes by Jack Kerouac

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. ‘Look’, he said. ‘You’re a fish in a pond. It’s drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything’s going to be all right.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, ‘Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?’ and Bull said, ‘I like it because it’s ugly.

And all you hearts who love life realize now that to love is to love-.

My philosophy is that you can’t explain the world. It’s too big and it’s too crazy and sometimes it’s funny and most of the time it’s... strange.

I cried for it. That’s how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.

I sat cross-legged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? “What’s going to happen to me up ahead?

Does this mean that frontiers from now on are to be in the imagination?

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.