Quote

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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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
Lasts
Last
Living
Keep
Carlo
Thing
Catching
Hopes
Honesty
Nobody

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.
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His friends said, Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there? and Bull said, I like it because it's ugly. All his life was in that line.
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You'd be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday
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The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A.
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Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
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Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.
Jack Kerouac
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Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.
Jack Kerouac
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Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.
Jack Kerouac
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all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
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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What do you want out of life? I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
Jack Kerouac
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And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.
Jack Kerouac
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Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
Jack Kerouac
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Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
Jack Kerouac
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Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.
Jack Kerouac
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And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
Jack Kerouac
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I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.
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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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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We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell
Jack Kerouac