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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

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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
Rather
Wood
Around
Hops
Home
Cook
Country
Cooks
Work
Woods
Food
Cans
Fire
Tin
Rich
Fires

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went.
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I just won't sleep, I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
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So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
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I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.
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-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity.
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The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
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Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that.
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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.
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The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.
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John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'
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I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.
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What do you want out of life? I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
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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.
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..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was
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Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
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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.
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Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.
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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
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Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.
Jack Kerouac
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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