Quote

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

Jack Kerouac

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Drunk
Older
Became
Grew
Mind
Like
Ecstasy

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

Image
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
Image
What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?
Jack Kerouac
Image
and the stars were icicles of mockery
Jack Kerouac
Image
The beauty of things must be that they end.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.
Jack Kerouac
Image
And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
Jack Kerouac
Image
Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
Jack Kerouac
Image
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Return those shoes to the shoemaker Return this hand to my father This pillow to the pillowmaker Those slippers to the shop. That wainscot to the carpenter, But my mind my tranquil and eternal Mind Return it to whom?
Jack Kerouac
Image
To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.
Jack Kerouac
Image
And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures? was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac
Image
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength
Jack Kerouac
Image
...most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I felt free and therefore I was free.
Jack Kerouac