Quote

What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.

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
Doe
Sitting
Earth
Difference
Anything
Differences
Terrace
Everything
Stars
Emptiness
Mean
Actually
Awake
Men
Universe
Throughout
Thinking
Means
Endless
Else
Empty

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die yelling & laughing.
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Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.
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Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
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An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else
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When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter? And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.
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What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.
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I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.
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Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.
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There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.
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Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.
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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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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.
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February dawn -- frost on the path Where I paced all winter.
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equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha
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The beauty of things must be that they end.
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I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
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As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk
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She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.
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In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.
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The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.
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