Jack Kerouac

I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength

Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.

I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.

Believe in the holy contour of life.

You don't know what to say to me because the kingdom is within...flesh and blood's dream...so you fly now, pay later, all of us...I mean actually it's PAY NOW, FLY LATER

Don't drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.

Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.

You can't live in this world but there's nowhere else to go.

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."

fear life but don't die, your alone, everybody's alone, oh Cody Pomeray you can't win you can't lose all is ephemeral all is hurt

I want to marry a [guy], so i can rest my soul with [him] till we both get old. This can't go on all the time-- all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.

but that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.