Quote

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear?

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
Young
Shall
Body
Dies
Conclusively
Soul
Face
Mangled
Live
Faces
Disintegrate
Look
Upon
Later
Looks
Fact
Soon
Fear
Begin
Facts
Pride

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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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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Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour.
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Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.
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He had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.
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It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
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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.
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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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Genius gives birth, talent delivers.
Jack Kerouac
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I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.
Jack Kerouac
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and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.
Jack Kerouac
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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.
Jack Kerouac
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She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.
Jack Kerouac
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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.
Jack Kerouac
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Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Jack Kerouac
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Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.’ You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die and the name of the grave is ‘success’, the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit.
Jack Kerouac
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Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.
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Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.
Jack Kerouac
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And with joy you realize for the first time Thinking's just like not thinking — So I don't have to think any more.
Jack Kerouac
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It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.
Jack Kerouac
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What do you want out of life? I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
Jack Kerouac