Jack Kerouac

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

Then it's goodbye, Sangsara for me Besides, girls aren't as good as they look And Samadhi is better than you think When it starts in hitting your head In with Buzz of glittergold Heaven's Angels, wailing, saying We've been waiting for you since morning, Jack Why were you so long dallying in the sooty room? This transcendental Brilliance Is the better part (of Nothingness I sing) Okay. Quit. Mad. Stop.

The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.

I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.

The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.

I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

The unspeakable visions of the individual.

and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.

I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.

Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.

I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it.

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.