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I'd better be a poet Or lay down dead.

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
Lays
Poet
Dead
Better

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
Jack Kerouac
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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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Always pull back-and see how silly we must look to God.
Jack Kerouac
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Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went.
Jack Kerouac
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Who doesn't feel studious when he doesn't have a girl with a Riviera suntan?
Jack Kerouac
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Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now.
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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He had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.
Jack Kerouac
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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.
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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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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Sweet life continues in the breeze, in the golden fields.
Jack Kerouac
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Rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything
Jack Kerouac
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What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?
Jack Kerouac
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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.
Jack Kerouac
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-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
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Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Jack Kerouac
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The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
Jack Kerouac
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But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.
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