Original name Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac
*The beat generation.
*All of life is a foreign country.
*This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
*The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...
Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957
*The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
*I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
* I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
*My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
*Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.
*Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
*What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
*All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
*Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.
*Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk- real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
*What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?
*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.
*Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
*Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
*...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...
*Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.
*Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
*Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
*We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
*...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...
*Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life, but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Cody Pomeray, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt.
*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 quote
*Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”
*I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?
° Beat Movement:
developed in the second half of the 1950's. It was launched by a group of poets and novelists who shared a set of attitudes-anti-establishment, anti-intellectual-opposed to the reigning political, moral and cultural values of the post-World War era and claiming self-expression and self-realization. "Beat" alludes to "beaten down" ( by the values of the time), to "beatitudes"
(reached in esoteric or Eastern religions, or drug-induced visionary experiences), or to the "beat" of jazz music. Main poets: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; main novelists: William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
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