Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Jack Kerouac (American Novelist, Poet)

Jack Kerouac (1922–69,) born Jean-Louis Kérouac, also Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, was an American novelist and poet. The primary figure of the “beat generation,” he is recognized for such autobiographical novels as On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958) that portray the ’50s spirit of the quest of a suitable mode of expression.

Born to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac attended Columbia University and the New York School for Social Research. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine and held various jobs in New York while writing his first novel, The Town and the City (1950.)

Kerouac is best known for his second novel, the semiautobiographical On the Road (1957.) His portrayal of a group of nonconformists who discover themselves as they improvise their way across America struck a chord with that generation’s iconoclastic readers. This novel established Kerouac as the leading novelist of the Beat Movement. His other notable works include Doctor Sax (1959) and Big Sur (1962.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Jack Kerouac

Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Goodness

All of life is a foreign country.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Life and Living

Whenever I heard thunder in the mountains it was like the iron of my mother’s love.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Motherhood

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of The Mind vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Time

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Authors & Writing

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
Jack Kerouac
Topics: America

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.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Solitude, Discovery

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Dreams

I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference!
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Apathy

They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Worry

I was just looking at the jukebox. Just playing records. She said, You want to play with me?.
I said, Sure. How much?.
She says, Five bucks, two dollars for the room.
Was it nice, Jack?.
All women are nice.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Women

After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living,’ I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds…
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Solitude

Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Stars

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Jack Kerouac
Topics: Live, Light, Body, People, Madness

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