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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
Poet
Dead
Better
Lays

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!
Jack Kerouac
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What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?
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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The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.
Jack Kerouac
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The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be supervised.
Jack Kerouac
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When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
Jack Kerouac
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Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift.
Jack Kerouac
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They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.
Jack Kerouac
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She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost like drowning in a witches' brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike.
Jack Kerouac
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February dawn -- frost on the path Where I paced all winter.
Jack Kerouac
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I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures? was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.
Jack Kerouac
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Down in Denver, all I did was die.
Jack Kerouac
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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.
Jack Kerouac
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It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
Jack Kerouac
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We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.
Jack Kerouac
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Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.
Jack Kerouac
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In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals.
Jack Kerouac
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What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.
Jack Kerouac
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Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'... But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.' There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!
Jack Kerouac
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...and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
Jack Kerouac