Let’s all just say “the hell with it!” and become really creative at last… free, basking, wandering, idly stopping here and there, tasting, enjoying.”
— Jack Kerouac
Happy birthday to Jack Kerouac—novelist, poet, and icon of the Beat Generation—who was born on this day in 1922.
Last year on this day, I published an article simply titled Happy birthday, Jack Kerouac celebrating the great writer. You can check it out here.
This year, I’ve curated some of my favorite passages from Kerouac’s works over the years that I’d like to share with you all. But first, here are a few words about Kerouac from three great artists he inspired.
Tom Waits:
“I’d read Kerouac when I was a teenager. That was profound... I immediately wanted to get on the road and start hitchhiking. And I did. I went all over—I went to Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas—just to get out there and see what it feels like. Everybody wants to try and jump off something that’s higher than he can handle, just to see if he’ll float quietly to the ground or break up on the rocks. Everybody wants to see what the world’s made of and wants to see what they’re made of.”
Ken Kesey:
“Kerouac had lots of class — stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself. If there is a bad guy, it’s poor old drunk Jack, stumbling around. You never hear him railing at the government or railing at this or that. He likes trains, people, bums, cars.”
Bob Dylan:
“I read [Kerouac’s] On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
Now on to the words of Jack Kerouac himself, born on this day 104 years ago in Lowell, Massachusetts. I hope you enjoy it.
“He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad.”
― Jack Kerouac
“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...”
—Jack Kerouac
“Defy the law! – Write the heartbroken poetry of the World!” – Jack Kerouac
“Don’t tell them too much about your soul. They’re waiting for just that.”
~ Jack Kerouac
“Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.”
― Jack Kerouac
“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, The Dharma Bums
"I came to a point where I needed solitude and 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."
—Jack Kerouac
“You get used to the dark, you realize the ghosts are all friendly…”
— Jack Kerouac
“I'm writing this book because we're all going to die — In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid...”
— Jack Kerouac
“I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.” ― Jack Kerouac
“I see myself as just doomed, pitiful — An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else…”
~ Jack Kerouac
“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
“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…
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.”
-- Jack Kerouac
“Parade my trouble in front of you guys? Make you realize that my heart is broken . . . that as long as I live I’ll have chains dragging me down to the oceans of sad tears that my feet are wet in already.”
—Jack Kerouac
“Get yourself a hut house not too far from town, live cheap, go ball in the bars once in awhile, write and rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and talk to grandmas you damn fool, carry loads of wood for them, clap your hands at shrines, get supernatural favors, take flower-arrangement lessons and grow chrysanthemums by the door, and get married for krissakes, get a friendly smart sensitive human-being gal who don’t give a shit for martinis every night and all that dumb white shit in the kitchen.”
~ Jack Kerouac
“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
— Jack Kerouac
“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had...of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word ‘beat’ spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction...”
~ Jack Kerouac
“Sometimes during the night I’d look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no family, no nothing, just myself the stupid son of plans all of them compacted of eventual darkness. God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life...”
—Jack Kerouac
“The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.”
— Jack Kerouac
"Can anyone be anything but a rebel in a conventional world like this?" ~ Jack Kerouac
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