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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
Better
Lays
Poet
Dead

More quotes by Jack Kerouac

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While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light
Jack Kerouac
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The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.
Jack Kerouac
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I just won't sleep, I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
Jack Kerouac
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I promise I shall never give up, and that I'll die yelling & laughing.
Jack Kerouac
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Genius gives birth, talent delivers.
Jack Kerouac
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All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.
Jack Kerouac
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The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.
Jack Kerouac
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The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac
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We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.
Jack Kerouac
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Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that.
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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His friends said, Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there? and Bull said, I like it because it's ugly. All his life was in that line.
Jack Kerouac
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We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell
Jack Kerouac
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I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact, not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
Jack Kerouac
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I'm right there, swimming the river of hardships but I know how to swim.
Jack Kerouac
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Nothing ever happened - Not even this
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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One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
Jack Kerouac
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The cause of the world's woe is birth, the cure of the world's woe is a bent stick.
Jack Kerouac
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..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was
Jack Kerouac