Quotessence
Home / Topics / On The Road Quotes

On The Road Quotes

Browse 25 quotes about On The Road.

On The Road Quotes

“Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.”

“The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare. I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.”

“That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.”

“We’ve all got a dozen or so friends, haven’t we? And when we’re drunk we philosophise well into the night on an array of subjects ranging from what happened before the Big Bang to who would win a fight between a vampire and zombie, to what’s the most compromising position to be caught in, but we’re hardly going to be extolled in 60 or 70 years’ time as the Heat Generation or the Cheat Generation or the Street Generation, are we? The Tweet Generation, maybe, but that’s about all. So what was it about these few guys? Well, they wrote about what they did, and what they did was quite revolutionary back then. They went On the Road, and it was Jack Kerouac’s book that turned the tide.”

“New Year Way Out by Stewart Stafford Take off down the truculent highway For a well-earned New Year escape Tasty lunch at some time warp hotel Seedy tree in an old folks dining room. Destination reached in crimson twilight Friends from back in the day greet us Bags dragged in, up and put in corners Then, downstairs for a seafood dinner. Catch up on all the gossip and chat Take a moonlight walk on the beach Crabs roam the sand as sleep comes Routine fractured in grinning dreams. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”

“On the road again. Nothing else feels better than this feeling. Being on the road. The road is where we sometimes find ourselves. Being on the road. The road is where we understand ourselves. Being on the road. Nothing else feels better than this feeling. Being on the road. To experience life. Being on the road. To see life in all its myriad reflections.”

“I'm packing my life in a bag again, saying goodbye and writing the last letters. It's been a long journey, back and forth, hide and seek, but this time it's different. This time I am different. I'm not sure where I want to end up but I know how to get there, or at least the first direction, the first turn, the first sunset. I'm longing for peace. I'm longing for borrowed guitars and detachment. Horizons, cheap whiskey straight from the bottle and your hands in mine.”

“We drove to the ocean and smoked cigarettes until six in the morning when I fell asleep on your chest. When you woke up I was gone and you went back to yours, and I keep having my best conversations while the world is asleep, trying to find myself somewhere between dawn and the sunrise. Dear universe, may I never find myself.”

“After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.”

“Am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts, but am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. There was a boy last night who I never spoke to because I was too drunk and still shy, but mostly lonely, and I couldn’t find anything lightly to say, so I simply walked away but still wondered what he did with his life because he didn’t even speak to me or look at me but still made me wonder who he was and I walked away asking Am I making something worth while? I am not sure. I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.”