#kerouac

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#love

I am young now and can look upon my body and soul with pride. But it will be mangled soon, and later it will begin to disintegrate, and then I shall die, and die conclusively. How can we face such a fact, and not live in fear? ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat #death-and-dying #early-stories-and-other-writings #fear-of-death #fleeting-life

We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America.... ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#kerouac #modernism #on-the-road #men

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#jack-kerouac #memory #vision #writer #writing

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat #early-stories-and-other-writings #experience-mistakes-wisdom #jack-kerouac #man

At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#on-the-road #sal-paradise #stars #home

Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#jack

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat-generation #jack-kerouac #mind #self #self-awareness

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

#mardou #the-subterraneans #art