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Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes

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Famous Jack Kerouac Quotes

“(...) porque as únicas pessoas autênticas, para mim, são as loucas, as que estão loucas por viver, loucas por falar, loucas por serem salvas, desejosas de tudo ao mesmo tempo, as que não bocejam nem dizem nenhum lugar -comum, mas ardem, ardem, ardem como fabulosas grinaldas amarelas de fogo-de-artifício a explodir, semelhantes a aranhas, através das estrelas e, no meio, vê-se o clarão azul a estourar e toda a gente exclama: «Aaaah!»”

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Book:On the Road
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“I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”

SoulBornSpaceMountainEmptyAwakeDieLetter
Book:The Portable Jack Kerouac
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“You know that I have hitch-hiked around and have been alone in weird cities and places, and waked up in the morning not knowing who I was (particularly one time in Des Moines.) Neal, what I want is a big home with about twenty people in it, whole families at the same time, something going on all the time, someone leaving, someone coming, someone building a shelf, someone mending a fence, someone sewing, someone cooking, someone reading, someone eating, so on, and on, on, on . . . I want all the Shakespearian gamut of things in one big tumultuous house. [letter to Neal Cassady, June 27, 1948]”

HomeLonelinessWanderingHome LifeHitchhiking
Book:Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956
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“Sad understanding is what compassion means - I resign from the attempt to be happy. It’s all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you’d only stare into space and in that space though you’d see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory furs and armors sniffing and miffed on benches of this one-same-ferry-boat to the other shore you’d still be staring into space for form is emptiness, and emptiness is form - O golden eternity, these simperers in your show of things, take them and slave them to your truth that is forever true forever - forgive me my human floppings - I think therefore I die - I think therefore I am born - Let me be void still - Like a happy child lost in a sudden dream and when his buddy addresses him he doesnt hear, his buddy nudges him he doesnt move; finally seeing the purity and truth of his trance the buddy watches in wonder - you can never be that pure again, and jump out of such trances with a happy gleam of love, being an angel in the dream”

ChildrenCompassionThe Void
Author:Jack Kerouac
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“Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led to the Fall? Souls in Heaven said "We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it's great!"—Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how.”

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Book:Desolation Angels
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“And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long. On Starvation Ridge little sticks Are trying to grow.”

LonelinessCoffeeWriters LifeJournalingOrchidsBeat GenerationBeatnikMountaintopWriters Room
Book:Desolation Angels
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“I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...) I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar... ...like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when they're only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...”

TruthLyingSinIllusionLieLsdCominternMarxian Dialectical Propaganda
Book:Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46
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“...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. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.”

Growing UpAdventureSelf DiscoveryLife ExperienceAmerican CultureTurning PointsTravelingRoad TripHauntedHomesickAmerican LiteratureWho Am IShadow SelfLost SoulStrange MomentQuest For Meaning
Author:Jack Kerouac
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“Sad understanding is what compassion means - I resign from the attempt to be happy. It’s all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you’d only stare into space and in that space though you’d see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory and armors sniffing and miffed on benches of this one-same-ferry-boat to the other shore you’d still be staring into space for form is emptiness, and emptiness is form - O golden eternity, these simperers in your show of things, take them and slave them to your truth that is forever true forever - forgive me my human floppings - I think therefore I die - I think therefore I am born - Let me be void still - Like a happy child lost in a sudden dream and when his buddy addresses him he doesnt hear, his buddy nudges him he doesnt move; finally seeing the purity and truth of his trance the buddy watches in wonder - you can never be that pure again, and jump out of such trances with a happy gleam of love, being an angel in the dream.”

ChildrenVoidKerouac
Book:Desolation Angels
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“They 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.”

DeathUniverseDying
Book:Lonesome Traveler
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“We pushed the bike down past the various college hangouts and cafeterias and looked into Robbie's to see if we knew anybody. Alvah was in there, working his part-time job as busboy. Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene-colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass nonidentity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in 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 to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”

SocietyCollegeThe Dharma Bums
Book:The Dharma Bums
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“What does it mean that those trees and mountains out there are not magic but real?' I'd yell, pointing outdoors. 'What?' they'd say. 'It means that those trees and mountains out there are not magic but real.' 'Yeah?' Then I'd say, 'What does it mean that those trees and mountains aren't real at all, just magic?' 'Oh come on.' 'It means that those trees and mountains aren't real at all, just magic.' 'Well which is it, goddammit!' 'What does it mean that you ask, well which is it goddammit?' I yelled. 'Well what?' 'It means that you ask well which is it goddammit.' 'Oh go bury your head in your sleeping bag, bring me a cup of that hot coffee.”

PhilosophyHumorFunnyExistenceHumour
Book:The Dharma Bums
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“And 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.”

LifeHappiness
Book:Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954
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“The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled. Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby - Talk about yr hot peace.”

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Book:Book of Sketches
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