Amber > Amber's Quotes

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

“Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“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

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Pain or love or danger makes you real again....”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

“colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures ...”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Rocks are space, and space is illusion.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“to me a mountain is a buddha. think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin." japhy got out the tea, chinese tea, and sprinkled some in the tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile...and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups...

"remember that book i told you about the first sip is joy and the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I felt free and therefore I was free.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I think it's a lovely hallucination but I love it sorta.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“...do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“It's only through form that we can realize emptiness”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“i've been reading whitman, you know what he says, cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the bard, the zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and there have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, i see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up into the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums