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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
Details
Writing
Life
Prose

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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What difference does it make after all?--anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.
Jack Kerouac
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Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.' 'Where we going, man?' 'I don't know but we gotta go.
Jack Kerouac
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Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.
Jack Kerouac
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It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac
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At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.
Jack Kerouac
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What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
Jack Kerouac
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There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.
Jack Kerouac
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But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do
Jack Kerouac
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And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.
Jack Kerouac
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We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.
Jack Kerouac
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Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?
Jack Kerouac
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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.
Jack Kerouac
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It's okay, girl, we'll make it till the sun goes down forever. And until then what you got to lose but the losing? We're fallen angels who didn't believe that nothing means nothing.
Jack Kerouac
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I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
Jack Kerouac
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Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I'll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already.
Jack Kerouac
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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)
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.
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.
Jack Kerouac
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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)
Jack Kerouac
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So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
Jack Kerouac