01UndatedDown on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
03UndatedA pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
04UndatedI woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
05UndatedOur battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is lifeJack Kerouac / quote ↗
09UndatedBut why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
10UndatedI was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
13UndatedAfter all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
14UndatedIt’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
16UndatedAw 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedHappy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
18UndatedAnd this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
20UndatedThey understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
21UndatedWay far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream coneJack Kerouac / quote ↗
23UndatedI like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.Jack Kerouac / quote ↗
24UndatedI'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway showJack Kerouac / quote ↗
