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Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

Jack Kerouac

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Jack Kerouac
Age: 47 †
Born: 1922
Born: March 13
Died: 1969
Died: October 21
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
East Chelmsford
Massachusetts
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
Kerouac
Jean-Louis Kerouac
Prison
Promise
Live
Right

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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and I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow - And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too. A long way to go.
Jack Kerouac
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You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.
Jack Kerouac
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What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.
Jack Kerouac
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And with joy you realize for the first time Thinking's just like not thinking — So I don't have to think any more.
Jack Kerouac
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-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity.
Jack Kerouac
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As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.
Jack Kerouac
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The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me
Jack Kerouac
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This was really the way my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.
Jack Kerouac
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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. But who wants to die?
Jack Kerouac
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I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
Jack Kerouac
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The beauty of things must be that they end.
Jack Kerouac
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Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.
Jack Kerouac
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I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.
Jack Kerouac
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We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.
Jack Kerouac
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I'd better be a poet Or lay down dead.
Jack Kerouac
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but that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too
Jack Kerouac
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I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
Jack Kerouac
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And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.
Jack Kerouac
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Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
Jack Kerouac
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Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
Jack Kerouac