Quote

Return those shoes to the shoemaker Return this hand to my father This pillow to the pillowmaker Those slippers to the shop. That wainscot to the carpenter, But my mind my tranquil and eternal Mind Return it to whom?

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
Hand
Carpenter
Father
Tranquil
Hands
Pillow
Mind
Shop
Shops
Shoes
Eternal
Shoemaker
Return
Slippers

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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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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What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.
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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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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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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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I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren't people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
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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.
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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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You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.
Jack Kerouac
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Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
Jack Kerouac
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I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference.
Jack Kerouac
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the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Jack Kerouac
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No time for poetry but exactly what is.
Jack Kerouac
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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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Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.
Jack Kerouac
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We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.
Jack Kerouac
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Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
Jack Kerouac
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Some's bastards, some's ain't. That's the score.
Jack Kerouac
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equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha
Jack Kerouac
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There is a blessedness surely to be believed, and that is that everything abides in eternal ecstasy, now and forever.
Jack Kerouac