Laura > Laura's Quotes

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“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 mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Will you love me in December as you do in May?”
― Jack Kerouac

“The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.”
― Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”
― Jack Kerouac

“They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars - Something good will come out of all things yet - And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“he saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.”
― jack kerouac

“The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?”
― Jack Kerouac

“Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
― Jack Kerouac

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Then it's goodbye, Sangsara for me
Besides, girls aren't as good as they look
And Samadhi is better than you think
When it starts in hitting your head
In with Buzz of glittergold
Heaven's Angels, wailing, saying
We've been waiting for you since morning, Jack
Why were you so long dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part (of Nothingness
I sing) Okay. Quit. Mad. Stop.”
― Jack Kerouac

“My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“It is possible for the human spirit to win after all.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”
― Kerouac

“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 -”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road