Quote

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

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
Lays
Poet
Dead
Better

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

Image
While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light
Jack Kerouac
Image
The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
Jack Kerouac
Image
The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.
Jack Kerouac
Image
An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else
Jack Kerouac
Image
You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.
Jack Kerouac
Image
You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention.
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
and the stars were icicles of mockery
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was
Jack Kerouac
Image
Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.
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
and I shudder sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she IS going to get me in a future lifetime, wow - And I seriously do believe that will be my salvation, too. A long way to go.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.
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
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.
Jack Kerouac
Image
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength
Jack Kerouac
Image
and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.
Jack Kerouac
Image
When you start separating people from their rivers, what have you got? Bureaucracy!
Jack Kerouac
Image
The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac