1,027 Quotes by Jack Kerouac

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.

To make the sea your own, to watch over it, to brood your very soul into it, to accept it and love it as though only it mattered and existed.

With joy realize for the first time thinking just not thinking-so I don’t have to think anymore.

I felt like telling Japhy everything I thought but I knew it didn’t matter and moreover he knew it anyway and silence is the golden mountain.

Smith, you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.′ The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and sometimes his gifts were old beat-up things but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.

Oftentimes an originator of new language forms is called ‘pretentious’ by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.

I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person – I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? – What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?

Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears.

I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever.