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
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
Image
But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do
Jack Kerouac
Image
In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift. . . . The net result of Naked Lunch will be to make people shudder at their own lies, will be to make them open up and be straight with one another. Swift and Rabelais and Sterne accomplished a step in that direction, and Burroughs another.
Jack Kerouac
Image
It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night.
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
We tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
Jack Kerouac
Image
If you own a rug you own too much.
Jack Kerouac
Image
Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.
Jack Kerouac
Image
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
Jack Kerouac
Image
equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha
Jack Kerouac
Image
What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
Night is longer than day for those who dream & day is longer than night for those who make their dreams comes true.
Jack Kerouac
Image
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
Image
Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??
Jack Kerouac
Image
The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.
Jack Kerouac
Image
I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
Jack Kerouac