Quotes from Jack Kerouac

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled—Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.

I've just figured out she is thirty-one-and-a-quarter-per-cent English, twenty-seven-and-a-half-per-cent Irish, twenty-five-per-cent German, eighty-and-three-quarters-per-cent Dutch, seven-and-a-half-per-cent Scotch, one-hundred-per-cent wonderful.

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk-real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Nothing else in the world matters but the kindness of grace, God's gift to suffering mortals

I liked this one One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. --Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned.

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain

Beat doesn't mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of goals: the vibrations of sincerity.

We gotta go and never stop till we get there. Where we going, man? I don't know but we gotta go.

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

In fact I realized I had no guts anyway, which I've long known. but I have joy.

I was going to rise, do some typing and coffee drinking in the kitchen all day since at that time work, work was my dominant thought, not love- not the pain which impels me to write this even while I don't want to, the pain which won't be eased by writing of this but heightened, but which will be redeemed, and if only it were a dignified pain and could be placed somewhere other than this black gutter of shame and loss and noisemaking folly in the night... /The Subterraneans