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I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.

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
Wisdom
Dies
Book
Writing
Going

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night.
Jack Kerouac
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It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
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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A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Jack Kerouac
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Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.
Jack Kerouac
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and the stars were icicles of mockery
Jack Kerouac
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When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter? And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.
Jack Kerouac
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Night is longer than day for those who dream & day is longer than night for those who make their dreams comes true.
Jack Kerouac
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At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.
Jack Kerouac
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If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?
Jack Kerouac
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You were my last chance' she's said but don't all women say that? - But can it be by 'last chance' she doesn't mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we've shared -
Jack Kerouac
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Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
Jack Kerouac
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Pretty girls make graves
Jack Kerouac
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But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?
Jack Kerouac
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We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell
Jack Kerouac
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Yeah, I said, but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?
Jack Kerouac
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I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.
Jack Kerouac
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You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.
Jack Kerouac
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And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I had to get to Denver at once.
Jack Kerouac
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Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
Jack Kerouac