Quotes from Lonesome Traveler

Jack Kerouac ·  157 pages

Rating: (5.4K votes)


“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living,' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds...”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“Jesus was a strange hobo who walked on water—”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler



“it's all the same to me as long as it can be exciting and goes around the world.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“All that hitchhikin
All that railroadin
All that comin back
to America”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“Of course world travel isn't as good as it seems, it's only after you've come back from all the heat and horror that you forget to get bugged and remember the weird scenes you saw”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler



“Sixty three sunsets I saw revolve on that perpendicular hill – mad raging sunsets pouring in sea foams of cloud through unimaginable crags like the crags you grayly drew in pencil as a child, with every rose-tint of hope beyond, making you feel just like them, brilliant and bleak beyond words. –”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“And since I'm well and on the bum again & aint got nothing else to do, but roam, long-faced, the real America, with my unreal heart, here I am eager and ready.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“For when you realized that God is Everything you know that you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what we made to appear.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“You just wait patiently like you always do in America among those apparently endless policemen and their endless laws against (no laws for) -- but the moment you cross the little wire gate and you're in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o'clock in the afternoon.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler



“Jesus was a strange hobo who walked on water.-
Buddha was also a hobo who paid no attention to the other hobo.-
Chief Rain-In-The-Face, weirder even.-”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“It's hypocrisy of men makes these hills grim”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“And I saw how everybody dies and nobody's going to care. I felt how it is to live just so you can die like a bull trapped in a screaming human ring.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“we pass the fields of Perry and Madrone and where they make wine, and it's all there, all sweet the furrows of brown, with blossoms and one time we took a siding to wait for 98 and I ran out there like the hound of the Baskervilles and got me a few old prunes not longer fitten to eat - the propietor seeing me, trainman running guiltily back to engine with a stolen prune, always I was running, always was running, running to throw switches, running in my sleep and running now - happy.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“But now 'tis the modern ole Coast Division S.P. and begins at those dead end blocks and at 4:30 the frantic Market Street and Sansome Street commuters as I say come hysterically running for ther 112 to get home on time for the 5:30 televisions Howdy Doody of their gun toting Neal Cassady'd Hopalong childrens. 1.9 miles to 23rd Street, another 1.2 Newcomb, another 1.0 to Paul Avenue and etcetera these being the little piss stops on that 5 miles short run thru 4 tunnels to mighty Bayshore, Bayshore at milepost 5.2 shows you as I say that gigantic valley wall sloping in with sometimes in extinct winter dusks the huge fogs milking furling meerolling in without a sound but as if you could hear the radar hum, the oldfashioned dullmasks mouth of Potato Patch Jack London old scrollwaves crawling in across the gray bleak North Pacific with a wild fleck, a fish, the wall of a cabin, the old arranged wallworks of a sunken ship, the fish swimming in the pelvic bones of old lovers lay tangled ath the bottom of the sea like slugs no longer discernible bone by bone but melted into one squid of time that fog, that terrible and bleak Seattlish fog that potatopatch wise comes bringing messages from Alaska and from the Aleutian mongol, and from the seal, and from the wave, and from the smiling porpoise, that fog at Bayshore you can see waving in and filling in rills and rolling down and making milk on hillsides and you think, "It's hypocricy of men makes these hills grim.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler



“Цял живот съм чел и съм се учил. Поставих рекорд по отсъствия в Колумбийския колеж, за да си стоя в общежитието, да пиша пиеси и да чета примерно Луи Фердинан Селин вместо „класиците“ от учебната програма.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“И аз съм бил скитник, но както разбирате, само донякъде, защото знаех, че един ден литературният ми труд ще бъде възнаграден със социална обезпеченост. Не съм бил истински бродяга като онези останали без всякаква надежда освен съкровената вечна надежда, с която човек се сдобива, докато спи в празни вагони, носещи се през долината на Салинас в горещото януарско слънце, наситено със Златна Вечност, към Сан Хосе, където някакви хора със сурови лица ще го изгледат презрително и ще му дадат нещо да хапне и да пийне – край железопътната линия или на брега на Гуадалупе Крийк.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


“Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize “The stars are words” and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind. There’s no need for solitude. So love life for what it is, and form no preconceptions whatever in your mind.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler


About the author

Jack Kerouac
Born place: in Lowell, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date March 12, 1922
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