Quotes about Life
No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
— Jack Kerouac
Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.
— Jack Kerouac
O hell, I'm sick of life - If I had any guts I'd drown myself in that tiresome water but that wouldn't be getting it over at all, I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up in some other wretched suffering form eternities of it - I guess that's what the kid feels - She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.
— Jack Kerouac
He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.
— Jack Kerouac
And then we'll all go off to sweet life, 'cause now is the time and we all know time!
— 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.
— Jack Kerouac
The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.
— Jack Kerouac
Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.' You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is 'success', the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit.
— Jack Kerouac
In a sense, I'm mad (and withdrawn from life) while they're sane, human, normal - but in another sense, I speak from the depths of a vision of truth when I say that this continual jockeying for position is the enemy of life in itself. It may be life, 'life is like that,' it may be human and true, but it's also the death-part of life, and our purpose after all is to live and be true. We'll see.
— Jack Kerouac
And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.
— Jack Kerouac
Dammit, that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in my life. I wish I had a tape recorder to take it down. Those things aren't made to be heard by the people down below, says Japhy, dead serious.
— Jack Kerouac
Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.
— Jack Kerouac