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On the Road QUOTES

On the Road QUOTES

1 " A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

2 " I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

3 " Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

4 " But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see? "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

5 " I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

6 " Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears... "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

7 " Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

8 " Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

9 " Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women! "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

10 " Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

11 " We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

12 " What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

13 " because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars... "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

14 " ...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

15 " It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

16 " I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - air you can kiss - and palms. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

17 " He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

18 " There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

19 " We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301). "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road

20 " I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go. "

― Jack Kerouac , On the Road