Jack Kerouac

“Hell! I’m glad I did it. It’s going to be a change. Icall this life!”

“...besides which Lucille wouldnever understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

“Don’t you have a class this morning, Georgie?”Day mumbled something that sounded like“Ancient History of the Near East and Greece.”“Poof!” scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,“Come with me and see the Near East.”

“You’d never care to plant some roots insociety, I suppose,” mused the other.”

“and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?”

“I realised either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world.And of course I was right.”

“Il pouvait à peine placer un mot tellement ça l'excitait de vivre.”

“..'' ve kimse ama kimse bilmiyor kimseye yaşlanmanın perişan süprüntülerinden başka ne olacağını; ve ben Neal Cassady'yi anıyorum ve anıyorum, hatta asla bulamadığımız yaşlı babası Neal Cassady'yi; ve Neal Cassady'yi anıyorum. Neal Cassady'yi anıyorum.”

“I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity's true and perfectly empty nature.”

“we got out of the car for air and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters. 'We're in the South! We've left the winter!' Faint daybreak illuminated green shoots by the side of the road. I took a deep breath; a locomotive howled across the darkness, mobile-bound. So were we. I took off my shirt and exulted”

“He had become completely mad in his movements; He seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying 'Am,' and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking”

“So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry”

“He knew the road would getmore interesting, especially ahead, always ahead.”

“Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.”

“I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life - This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours.”

“You just wait patiently like you always do in America among those apparently endless policemen and their endless laws against (no laws for) -- but the moment you cross the little wire gate and you're in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o'clock in the afternoon.”

“Oh what was the racket that backeted and smashed in raging might, to make this oil-puddle world?--”

“...the innocent seriousness with which she told her story and I'd listened to so often and myself told-- wide eyed hugging in heaven together-- hipsters of America in the 1950's sitting in a dim room-- the clash of the streets beyond the window's bare soft sill.”

“Out on the road outside Cheyenne Wells a great argument developed between Pomeray and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or lot of wine, one being a wino, the other an alcoholic. Not having eaten for a long time, feverish, they leaped out of the car and started making brawling gestures at each other which were supposed to represent a fistfight between two men...and the next moment they were embracing each other, old Pomeray tearfully, Old Bull raising his eyes with lonely sarcasm at the huge and indefatigable heavens above Colorado...because everybody was in a hole during the Depression, and felt it”

“I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea.”

“Vinny's was the scene of suicide hookies.”

“Artist or no-artist, I can't pass up a piece of fried chicken when I see one.”

“Los huesos humanos no son más que vanas líneas que se desvanecen, el universo entero un vacío molde de estrellas.”

“Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it - everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT.”

“What is a rainbow, Lord?A hoop for the lowly.”

“Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific.”

“The floors of bus stations are the same all over the country, always covered with butts and spit and they give a feeling of sadness that only bus stations have.”

“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.”

“When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

“We also spent entire nights in bed and I told her my dreams. I told her about the big snake of the world that was coiled in the earth like a worm in an apple and would someday nudge up a hill to be thereafter known as Snake Hill and fold out upon the plain, a hundred miles long and devouring as it went along. I told her this snake was Satan. "What's going to happen?" she squealed; meanwhile she held me tight.”

“Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night.”

“Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world.”

“A kalapos tenorszaxis épp egy csodálatos impro csúcsára hágott, az emelkedő-süllyedő riff az „Í-JÁ“-ból átment az őrültebb „Í-dil-lij-já!“-ba és együtt zengett a csikkheges dobok görgő robajával, amiket egy drabálisan és brutálisan nagydarab bikanyaku fickó csépelt, akit nem érdekelt semmi más, csak szadizta a szerkóját, brimm, ritili-bumm, brimm.”

“Hát ennyi volt az én hollywoodi karrierem - ez volt az utolsó estém Hollywoodban, a parkoló klotyója mögött ültem, és kentem a mustárt a szendvicseimre.”

“I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?”

“A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.”

“Did you ever stand on a street corner in American at five o'clock in the morning? I did.”

“A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.”

“I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.”

“Pensando nas estrelas noite após noite começo a perceber que 'As estrelas são palavras' e todos os incontáveis mundos da VIa Láctea são palavras, e esse mundo também o é. E percebo que não importa onde eu esteja, seja em um quartinho repleto de ideias ou nesse universo infinito de estrelas e montanhas, tudo está na minha mente. Não há necessidade de solidão. Por isso, ame a vida pelo que ela é e não forme ideias preconcebidas de espécie alguma em sua mente.”

“Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”

“Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.”

“Ah, holy hole!”

“it's all the same to me as long as it can be exciting and goes around the world.”

“And since I'm well and on the bum again & aint got nothing else to do, but roam, long-faced, the real America, with my unreal heart, here I am eager and ready.”

“All that hitchhikinAll that railroadinAll that comin backto America”

“those who're good stay in Heaven,they've been in Heaven from the beginning”

“Most of them were running away from something―usually the law.”

“All life is but a skull-bone andA rack of ribs through whichwe keep passing food & fuel-just so's we can burn sofurious beautiful.”

“O how wonderful life is, how miraculous, God made this and God made that", "how do you know he doesn't hate what He did: He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done tho of course that's not true”