1,027 Quotes by Jack Kerouac

We are nothing. – Tomorrow we may be die. We are nothing. – You and me.

If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adiron dacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever – think of that wonderful Hudson Valley.

Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain’t this and that at all?

This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.

As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.

Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it’s actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don’t you see that? By itself it’s a no-thing, it’s really mental, it’s seen only of your mind. In other words it’s empty and awake.

You know,” I said, “I think it doesn’t make any difference to him anyway. He’s just satisfied to wander around and forget things.