Quotes from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“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, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world. ”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“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. ”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined. ”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“You have absolutely no regard but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what's hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you're silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and that there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, wiht a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. - Sal Paradise”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“Here I was at the end of America...no more land...and nowhere was nowhere to go but back”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been. ”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“This can't go on all the time...all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhat far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. Allen”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side if Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled nightlike old Frisco of my dreams. We were situated on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains where somewhere a man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word and would arrive any minute and make us silent.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“In the hall itself the din of the music - for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for - was so tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the realization that we had never dared to play music as we wanted, and this was how loud we wanted.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach and which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the Angels dove off and flew into infinity.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“All around me were the noise of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career - this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“I remember him standing under a streetlamp.
'Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?'
I certainly agreed.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“a traveling epic Hunkey, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer and only because he has no place he can stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, and keep rolling under the stars”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“But you can go on thinking and imagining forever further and stop at no decisions to pick up a bag for the thinkings. Turn your thinking into your work, your thoughts a book, in sieges.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they'll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they WANT- it's MY FATHER MY FATER MY FATHER all over again!”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

“Then he told me how Dean had met Camille. Roy Johnson, the poolhall boy, had found her in a bar and took her to a hotel; pride taking over his sense, he invited the whole gang to come up and see her. Everybody sat around talking with Camille. Dean did nothing but look out a window. Then when everybody left, Dean merely looked at Camille, pointed at his wrist, made the sign 'four' (meaning he'd be back at four), and went on. At three the door was locked to Roy Johnson. At four it was open to Dean. I wanted to go right out and see the madman.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from On the Road: the Original Scroll

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