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Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes

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Famous Jack Kerouac Quotes

“It’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.”

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Author:Jack Kerouac
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“Sometimes I’d get mad because things didn’t work out so well, I’d spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I’d be so mad I’d want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”

WantMindWellsSometimesWaterHurtExistenceCircumstancesMadWork OutFleshKicksGloriousBitesOne TimeSlipsToesSailingSpoilShovelsCupboardsShackGorgesFlapjacks
Book:The Dharma Bums
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“Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.”

SelfCountryEyeWantedFacesClearCuttingAirCrazyBearsMadFruitMalesCornersEnvyRageFrightenedHer EyesClosetsEnviousDeanSinisterSullenContainment
Book:On the Road
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“What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.”

ThinkingKnowsMenMeanDoeEarthUniverseStarsDifferencesSittingEmptyEndlessAwakeEmptinessTerrace
Book:The Dharma Bums
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“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?”

DoeNightWaitingDarkWalksLevelsMillionsListeningRainTownsGravesBranchesMelancholySteadySeptemberSmall TownRoaringBroodingDrippingRain At Night
Book:The Town and the City
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“He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.”

FeelsStillsMightBeautifulFeltStrangeAdventureCaughtThroatLife Adventure
Book:The Town and the City
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“But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. "Pretty girls make graves," was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the in­comparable pretties of Indian Mexico.”

YearsFeelingsLyingSufferingTurnsGirlCausesGoneBirthDirectGravesLustIndianStaringMexicoPrincessOffensivePretty GirlCelibacySuffering And Death
Book:The Dharma Bums
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“The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.”

SilenceBloodBirthEarsStressForgottenIntenseMysteriousDiamondSilence IsRemindingRoaring
Book:The Dharma Bums
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“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.”

ThinkingWorldWayMindLittlesMatterNightUniverseStarsRealizingRoomsThis WorldMountainEndlessMilky Way
Book:Lonesome Traveler
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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.”

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Book:Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings
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