Quotes from Jack Kerouac

The whole purpose of mountain-climbing to me isn't just to show off you can get to the top, it's getting out to this wild country.

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all of my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night.

There's a purpose to knowledge … salvation. What good are my visions or your visions, beautifully and laboriously worked out in art, if the purpose of it is not to save something in our souls and make it all beautiful.

Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy….

I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy

Chad is a slim blond boy with a strange witch-doctor face that goes with his interest in anthropology and prehistory Indians, His nose beaks softly and almost creamily under a golden flare of hair; he has the beauty and grace of a Western hotshot who's danced in roadhouses and played a little football. A quavering twang comes out when he speaks.

All I hope, Dean, is someday we'll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together.

As I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and I knelt on the trail and said Thank you, shack. The I added Blah with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would know what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world

I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this.

A blessed night. I immediately fell into a blank thoughtless trance wherein it was again revealed to me "This thinking has stopped" and I sighed because I didn't have to think any more and felt my whole body sink into a blessedness surely to be believed, completely relaxed and at peace with all the ephemeral world of dream and dreamer and the dreaming itself.

Well, now you know me. You know I don't have close relationships with anybody any more - I don't know what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don't know where to put it down.