1,027 Quotes by Jack Kerouac

ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you

All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers.

The beat generation (coined in Playboy)

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.

Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.

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

I felt free and therefore I was free.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.