Quotes from The Subterraneans

“The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person — I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? — What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“How clear the realization one is going mad -- the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“DEAR BABY, Isn’t it good to know winter is coming—”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“I feel impossibly sad and like I'll die, what can we do?”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“and rain will fall on our eaves.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“... this girl I was SEEKING to get involved with as if not enough trouble already or other old romances hadn't taught me that message of pain, keep asking for it, for life”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“O love, fled me - or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night?”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, 'Man don't pluck those dirty notes at ME,' and like he just got up without a word and left. [Mardou]”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“but I should have known from her original announcement of independence to believe in the sincerity of her distaste for involvement, instead hurling on at her as if and because in fact I wanted to be hurt and 'lacerate' myself”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“(difficult to make a real confession and show what happened when you're such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big sole details about others go sitting and waiting around)”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“...poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future and attesting to the madness, hollowness, ring and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where trees sing -- in a funny wind -- well-being believes he'll go to heaven -- a word to the wise is enough -- 'Smart went Crazy”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“...the innocent seriousness with which she told her story and I'd listened to so often and myself told-- wide eyed hugging in heaven together-- hipsters of America in the 1950's sitting in a dim room-- the clash of the streets beyond the window's bare soft sill.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“I could have made my whole life like that morning just on the strength of pure understanding and willingness to live and go along, God it was all the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in its own way - but it was all sinister.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“now this warm thought of greatness is a big chill in the wind—for”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it's poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“you always go for the ones who don’t really want you—she really wanted Adam Moorad, she had just been rejected coldly and subterraneanly by Julien—she was interested in thin ascetic strange intellectuals of San Francisco and Berkeley and not in big paranoiac bums of ships and railroads and novels and all that hatefulness which in myself is to myself so evident and so to others too—though and because ten years younger than I seeing none of my virtues which anyway had long been drowned under years of drugtaking and desiring to die, to give up, to give it all up and forget it all, to die in the dark star—it was I stuck out my hand, not she—ah time.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“to the Red Drum for sets, to hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos—not a challenging look but the king and founder of the bop generation at least the sound of it in digging his audience digging the eyes, the secret eyes him-watching, as he just pursed his lips and let great lungs and immortal fingers work,”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“Mientras duermo los tres se van (hacen bien) a la playa, en el coche de Sand, a treinta kilómetros de la casa; los muchachos se zambullen, nadan, Mardou se pasea por las orillas de la eternidad, mientras sus pies y los dedos de sus pies que yo tanto amo se imprimen en la arena clara, pisando las conchillas y las anémonas y las algas secas y empobrecidas, lavadas por las mareas y el viento que le despeina el cabello corto, como si la Eternidad se hubiera encontrado con Heavenly Lane (así se me ocurrió mientras estaba en la cama). (Al imaginarla por otra parte paseándose sin rumbo, con una mueca de aburrimiento, sin saber qué hacer, abandonada por Leo el Sufriente, y realmente sola e incapaz de conversar acerca de todos los fulanos, menganos y zutanos de la historia del arte con Bromberg y Sand, ¿qué podía hacer?)”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“Y es así como, una vez obtenida la esencia de su amor, ahora erijo grandes construcciones verbales, y de ese modo en realidad lo traiciono, repitiendo calumnias como quien tiende las sábanas sucias al mundo; y las suyas, las nuestras, durante los dos meses de nuestro amor (así lo creí) sólo fueron lavadas una vez, porque ella era una subterránea solitaria que se pasaba los días abstraída y decidida a llevarlas al lavadero, pero de pronto se descubre que ya es casi de noche y demasiado tarde, y las sábanas ya están grises, hermosas para mí porque así son más suaves.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

“Марду в конце концов сказала мне: "Я бы предпочла счастливого человека несчастливым стихам которые он нам оставил,”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Subterraneans

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“Things we had, like respect and trust, but also freely expressed desires and accountability to whatever degree it took to make both people happy. It took work, a willingness to fight passionately and fairly--out of bed, not just in it--commitment and honesty. It took waking up and saying each day, "I hold this man sacred and always will. He's my sun, moon, and stars."
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“That thing that everyone talks about. That really big newspaper in the sky that came along and ruined everything else, blah blah blah.'
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“And it's a little different with every guy, so it's kind of hard to generalize—but if I had to describe the feeling of a crush, I'd say this: you just finished running a mile, and you have to throw up, and you're starving, but no food seems appealing, and your brain becomes fog, and you also have to pee. It's this close to intolerable. But I like it.”
― Becky Albertalli, quote from The Upside of Unrequited

“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.”

“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?”

“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”

“Waiting for the perfect love?”

“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”

“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.

“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”

“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”

“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”

“So then what?”

“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”

“Sounds crazy to me.”

“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria

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