Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969)
Born Jean-Louis Lebris Kerouac, was an American novelist, poet and artist.
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.
The world that [Kerouac] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one.
Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.
A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Did the tea-time of your soul
Make you long for wilder days
Did you never let Jack Kerouac
Wash over you in waves?
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
He did more in one lifetime than most people do in ten.
Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth.
All of life is a foreign country.
I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.
He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.
Kerouac was "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle" in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence, ... the intellective void ... the spiritual drabness.
We will write a postcard
To our friends and family
In free verse On the road with Kerouac
Sheltered in his Bivouac
On this road we'll never die...
So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
"Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy."
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
I could give you a list a mile long of the homosexuals in the arts but there's no point in making a big tzimis about a relatively harmless and cool state of affairs — Each man to his own tastes.
Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.