Jack Kerouac Quotes

Be in love with your life, every detail of it.

My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.

A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind [it] is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.

My witness is the empty sky.

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize ‘The stars are words’ and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

Symbolism is alright in ‘fiction,’ but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.

I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.