Quotes from Jack Kerouac

Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.

Because he was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rubbing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night... (p. 128)

He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it.

I am an appearance The world is an appearance The bread I eat is an appearance All wish't forth from Mind Essence Due to Ignorance-- I don't have to exist I don't exist, I do exist-- Who cares? For the purposes of this world Do nothing Or do everything anyhow.

I wanta swim in rivers and drink goatmilk and talk with priests and just read Chinese books and amble around the valleys talking to farmers and their children.

I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.

And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.

You dont have to know a soul to know what I know --- to expect what I'm expecting --- to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day --- When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now, Ti mon Pousse

At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.

It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.

Ripples in the upside down lake of the void . . . The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down

In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk--it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love--I saw Maggie's black hair in this night-- In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery.