Quote

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.

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
Mind
Scene
Something
Writer
Involved
Ness
Memories
Involuntary
Vision
Haunted
Interest
Selected
Dream
Memory
Even
Interested

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

Image
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
Image
But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do
Jack Kerouac
Image
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.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
You don't know what to say to me because the kingdom is within...flesh and blood's dream...so you fly now, pay later, all of us...I mean actually it's PAY NOW, FLY LATER
Jack Kerouac
Image
Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just talents.
Jack Kerouac
Image
To think that so much comes to so little, to think that life is really short.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.
Jack Kerouac
Image
So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
Jack Kerouac
Image
What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
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
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Jack Kerouac