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.
Interpretation
Leaving can be a liberating experience that opens up new possibilities in life.
In this quote, Jack Kerouac reflects on the surprising ease and positive emotions associated with the act of leaving, suggesting that departing from familiar surroundings can lead to a new world full of opportunities. This perspective highlights the transformative power of change and the excitement that comes with embracing the unknown.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth, one might say, 'As Jack Kerouac said, leaving can open up a world rich with new possibilities.'
Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.
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.
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories.
Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
The War on Drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.
Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can 'solve the climate crisis.' But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.
There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.
I recalled how much time i had spent fighting for something i didn't even want. maybe because i had been too lazy to think of other avenues to follow. maybe because i had been afraid of what others would think. maybe because it was hard work to be different. perhaps, because a human being is condemned to repeat the steps taken by the previous generation until a certain number of people begin to behave in a different fashion. then the world changes, and we change with it.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.
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