Quote

I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim.

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
Rivers
Right
Hardships
Hardship
Swimming
Swim
River

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

Image
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
Image
I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren't people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
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
I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Jack Kerouac
Image
The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
Jack Kerouac
Image
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are happy, O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of happy nuts. (p. 200)
Jack Kerouac
Image
Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.
Jack Kerouac
Image
The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be supervised.
Jack Kerouac
Image
When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!
Jack Kerouac
Image
Yeah, I said, but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?
Jack Kerouac
Image
I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.
Jack Kerouac
Image
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can't fall off a mountain.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
Jack Kerouac
Image
In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood
Jack Kerouac
Image
...do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.
Jack Kerouac
Image
At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.
Jack Kerouac