One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -
Quotes Jack Kerouac - page 3
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We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.
The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.
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They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.
We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).
Think what a great world revolution will take place when ... [there are] millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.
...and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.
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.
At night I closed my eyes and saw my bones threading the mud of my grave.
Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.
I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?
I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.
Everything I wrote was true because I believed what I saw.
Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again.
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.
I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
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Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.