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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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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
Thinking
Life
Realize
Like
Joy
Realizing
Firsts
First
Time
Think

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.
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We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.
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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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I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.
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He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence
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Be in love with your life, every detail of it.
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Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.
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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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Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.
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My life is a vast inconsequential epic.
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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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I just won't sleep, I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
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You were my last chance' she's said but don't all women say that? - But can it be by 'last chance' she doesn't mean mere marriage but some profoundly sad realization of something in me she really needs to go on living, at least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we've shared -
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Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
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And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.
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So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
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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.
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What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?
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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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A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
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