Quotes from Jack Kerouac

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 never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.

I want to marry a girl, I told them, so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old.

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.

Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.

It made me think that everything was about to arrive—the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.

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!

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...

You can't live in this world but there's no where else to go.

I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.

My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.

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. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.