Quotes from The Dharma Bums

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

“It all ends in tears anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Dharma Bums

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

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

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

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

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

“The silence was an intense roar.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

“Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'...
But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.'
There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from 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, quote from The Dharma Bums

“my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

“The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

“I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

“Who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

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

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

“i wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

“Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from 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, quote from The Dharma Bums

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

“The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums

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

About the author

Popular quotes

“A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he’d seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut.

I didn't spit on it, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps. He’d stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands. She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently.

He couldn’t stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces streaked with sweat.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The Fever

“Actually,” Jayden said, “Not completely unlike the Cloak of Invisibility, although different in that those individuals using these devices wouldn’t become completely invisible. Exactly.” “So nothing like it,” Matthias said. “Moron status secured.”
― A.E. Kirk, quote from Demons in Disguise

“We are always in a certain amount of pain. There is chafing somewhere, and if it isn’t in our body, then it’s in our mind. There’s an itch, all the time.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star

“A sudden yowl from up ahead had them all starting. A small tree smoked on one side, the faint glow of fire darting from a burning patch of dead foliage. The yowl came again. Matt hurried over and peered up the tree to see a calico cat, its green eyes staring down, as if in accusation.
"No," Reyna said, stopping beside him. "We are not rescuing the cat."
"But the tree -"
"- is on fire. I see that. Have you ever owned a cat? If they can go up, they can come down. Guaranteed."
Matt eyed the feline. It eyed him back, then yowled, as if to say Well, hurry it up.
"It might be too scared to come down," he said.
"It's a cat," Reyna said. "They don't get scared - just annoyed, which I'm going to get if you insist on playing hero and rescuing that faker." She scowled at the cat. "Yes, I mean you. Faker."
The cat sniffed, then turned to Matt, clearly sensing the softer touch.
Owen stepped forward. "If you'll feel better rescuing the cat, Matt, then go ahead. We aren't on a tight schedule."
Reyna waved her arms around the smoking street. "Um, Ragnarök?"
"And the longer you two bicker ..."
"Fine," Reyna said. "I've got this." Before Matt could protest, she walked to the base of the tree, grabbed the lowest branch, and swung up. "Rodeo girl, remember? Also, five years of gymnastics, which my mother thought would make me more graceful and feminine. Her mistake."
She shimmied along a branch. "Come on, faker. I'm your designated hero for today." She looked down at Matt. "And if you ever tell anyone I rescued a cat from a tree ..."
Before Matt could answer, the cat sprang to the ground.
"Arggh!" Reyna said.
"You scared him out," Matt said. "He just needed the extra motivation. No, wait. It's a she. Calicos are almost always female."
"Are they? Huh." Reyna swung out. The cat sat on the ground below, watching.
"See?" Matt said. "She's grateful."
"She's gloating. Let's go.”
― K.L. Armstrong, quote from Thor's Serpents

“When one has apparently made up one’s mind to spend the evening at home and has donned one’s house-jacket and sat down at the lamplit table after supper and do the particular job or play the particular game on completion of which one is in the habit of going to bed, when the weather out is so unpleasant as to make staying in the obvious choice, when one has been sitting quietly at the table for so long already that one’s leaving must inevitably provoke general astonishment, when the stairwell is in any case in darkness and the street door locked, and when in spite of all this one stands up, suddenly ill at ease, changes one’s coat, reappears immediately in street clothes, announces that one has to go out and after a brief farewell does so, feeling that one has left behind one a degree of irritation commensurate with the abruptness with which one slammed the apartment door, when one then finds oneself in the street possessed of limbs that respond to the quite unexpected freedom one has procured for them with out-of-the-ordinary agility, when in the wake of this one decision one feels capable, deep down, of taking any decision, when one realizes with a greater sense of significance than usual that one has, after all, more ability than one has need easily to effect and endure the most rapid change, and when in this frame of mind one walks the long city streets—then for that evening one has stepped completely outside one’s family, which veers into inessentiality, while one’s own person, rock solid, dark with definition, thighs thrusting rhythmically, assumes it true form.
The whole experience is enhanced when at that late hour one looks up a friend to see how he is.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Short Stories

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.