On the Road
Quotes from the Book
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.
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.
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...
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.
Jesus was a strange hobo who walked on water—
it's all the same to me as long as it can be exciting and goes around the world.
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.
And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.
All that hitchhikin All that railroadin All that comin back to America
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
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. –
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.
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.
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.
I never dwelt on the dark farcical furious real life of this roaring working world, wow.
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.-
It's hypocrisy of men makes these hills grim
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.
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.
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.
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.
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About Jack Kerouac
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Keep reading
On the Road
The Dharma Bums
Desolation Angels
The Waste Lands
The Monkey Wrench Gang
O Pioneers!
The Plover
Moon Palace
The Illustrated Man
Out of Africa
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
A House in the Sky
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Year of the Monkey
A Coney Island of the Mind
The Quick and the Dead
I Cheerfully Refuse
Station Eleven
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories
Too Loud a Solitude
The Rum Diary
Insomnia
Dream Work
Dhalgren
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Tropic of Capricorn
Walking
West with the Night
Three Comrades
Provinces of Night
Days Without End
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories
Travels with Myself and Another
Roughing It
Bag of Bones
The Complete Stories
Light in August
Fiesta
The People in the Trees
Revolutionary Road
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
Henderson the Rain King
The Sea, the Sea
The Sea
Engleby
The Complete Short Stories
The Vast Fields of Ordinary
Let the Great World Spin
Flights
Dandelion Wine
The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas
A Thousand Acres
Into the Wild
The Emperor of Gladness
Winter's Tale
A Thousand Moons
The Brooklyn Follies
Slaughterhouse-Five
Netherland

