Quote

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.

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
Point
Solitude
Enjoy
Clouds
Living
Machines
Wanted
Needed
Look
Stop
Looks
Came
Enjoying
Thinking
Call
Machine
Life
Lying
Grass

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While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light
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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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His friends said, Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there? and Bull said, I like it because it's ugly. All his life was in that line.
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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.
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Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
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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.
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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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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)
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If you own a rug you own too much.
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Yeah, I said, but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?
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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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Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.
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It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.
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It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.
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all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
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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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Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.
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You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.
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Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.
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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.
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