Quote

I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic.

Jack Kerouac

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Beatnik
Catholic

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

Image
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
Image
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.
Jack Kerouac
Image
...most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.
Jack Kerouac
Image
All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac
Image
All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all
Jack Kerouac
Image
i wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just talents.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
Jack Kerouac
Image
My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.
Jack Kerouac
Image
The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me
Jack Kerouac
Image
The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
-no girl had ever moved me with a story of spiritual suffering and so beautifully her soul showing out radiant as an angel wandering in hell and the hell the selfsame streets I'd roamed in watching, watching for someone just like her and never dreaming the darkness and the mystery and eventuality of our meeting in eternity.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.
Jack Kerouac
Image
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
Jack Kerouac
Image
When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!
Jack Kerouac