Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969)
Born Jean-Louis Lebris Kerouac, was an American novelist, poet and artist.
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?
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.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
"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."
So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
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...
Kerouac was "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle" in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence, ... the intellective void ... the spiritual drabness.
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.
I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.
Everything is going to the beat — It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...
Sociability is just a big smile, and a big smile is nothing but teeth.
He did more in one lifetime than most people do in ten.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Did the tea-time of your soul
Make you long for wilder days
Did you never let Jack Kerouac
Wash over you in waves?
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
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.
Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left.
The world that [Kerouac] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one.