When we make ourselves high priests of art we deceive ourselves again, art is like a genie. It is more powerful than ourselves, but only by virtue of ourselves does it exist and create. Like a genie it has no will of its own, and is, even somewhat stupid; but by our will it moves to build our gleaming palaces and provide a mistress for the palace, which is most important. The high priest is a cultist, who worships the genie that someone else has invoked.

— Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Quotes

I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.

— Jack Kerouac

Locomotives smoked and reeled above him. His shadow followed him, it aped his walk and thoughts and very being.

— Jack Kerouac

Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium. in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.

— Jack Kerouac

We went back to the barn; I made love to her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing?

— Jack Kerouac

I had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, as I realized when we got back into the house and I saw the Christmas tree, the presents, and smelled the roasting turkey and listened to the talk of the relatives, but now the bug was on me again, and the bug’s name was Dean Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road.

— Jack Kerouac

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I should have known better.

— Jack Kerouac

The most religious moments of American life are undergone on Saturday nights.

— Jack Kerouac

The hobo has two watches you can’t buy at Tiffany’s, on one wrist the sun, on the other wrist the moon, both bands are made of sky.

— Jack Kerouac

It was the myth of the rainy night.

— Jack Kerouac

God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored?

— Jack Kerouac

He was a tall, gangly, shy satirist who mumbled to you with his head turned away and always said funny things.

— Jack Kerouac

It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? – sleep. But this foolish gang was bending onward.

— Jack Kerouac

These fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues you can find it almost anywhere else, in Morocco, in Latin America entire in Dakar, In Kurd land.

— Jack Kerouac

Knights grow bold growing old; young knights dream.

— Jack Kerouac

It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of Lum mum afternoon Nathin to do, ole fresco with end of land sadness- the people the alley full of trucks and cars of business nearabout and nobody knew or far from cared who i was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth-o opened up and at last belonged to me in great America.

— Jack Kerouac

Dean pointed out with a grimace of pain. “It’s not the kind of sweat we have, it’s oily and it’s always there because it’s always hot the year round and she knows nothing of non-sweat, she was born with sweat and dies with sweat.” The sweat on her little brow was heavy, sluggish; it didn’t run; it just stood there and gleamed like a fine olive oil. “What that must do to their souls! How different they must be.

— Jack Kerouac

We didn’t know what to expect. “Where will he sleep? What’s he going to eat? Are there any girls for him?” It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting exstasies.

— Jack Kerouac

They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.

— Jack Kerouac

And there’s my room, small, gray in the Sunday morning, now all the franticness of the street and night before is down with, bums sleep, maybe one or two sprawled on sidewalk with empty poor boy on a sill-my mind whirls with life.

— Jack Kerouac

O sad American night!

— Jack Kerouac
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