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The Subterraneans QUOTES

The Subterraneans QUOTES

1 " I feel impossibly sad and like I'll die, what can we do? "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

2 " Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

3 " and rain will fall on our eaves. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

4 " The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

5 " now this warm thought of greatness is a big chill in the wind—for "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

6 " ah, you always go for the ones who don't really want you "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

7 " I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person — I’ve often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I’d turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? — What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take? "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

8 " How clear the realization one is going mad -- the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

9 " DEAR BABY, Isn’t it good to know winter is coming— "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

10 " Why did God make all this all so decayable and dieable and harmable and wants to make me realize and scream? "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

11 " I would fave preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he's left us "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

12 " ... this girl I was SEEKING to get involved with as if not enough trouble already or other old romances hadn't taught me that message of pain, keep asking for it, for life "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

13 " but I should have known from her original announcement of independence to believe in the sincerity of her distaste for involvement, instead hurling on at her as if and because in fact I wanted to be hurt and 'lacerate' myself "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

14 " O love, fled me - or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night? "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

15 " (difficult to make a real confession and show what happened when you're such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big sole details about others go sitting and waiting around) "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

16 " I stood in the middle of the room flipping and Pusher was plucking at the guitar, just one string, and I went up to him and said, 'Man don't pluck those dirty notes at ME,' and like he just got up without a word and left. [Mardou] "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

17 " ...the innocent seriousness with which she told her story and I'd listened to so often and myself told-- wide eyed hugging in heaven together-- hipsters of America in the 1950's sitting in a dim room-- the clash of the streets beyond the window's bare soft sill. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

18 " I could have made my whole life like that morning just on the strength of pure understanding and willingness to live and go along, God it was all the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me in its own way - but it was all sinister. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

19 " ...poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future and attesting to the madness, hollowness, ring and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where trees sing -- in a funny wind -- well-being believes he'll go to heaven -- a word to the wise is enough -- 'Smart went Crazy "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans

20 " you always go for the ones who don’t really want you—she really wanted Adam Moorad, she had just been rejected coldly and subterraneanly by Julien—she was interested in thin ascetic strange intellectuals of San Francisco and Berkeley and not in big paranoiac bums of ships and railroads and novels and all that hatefulness which in myself is to myself so evident and so to others too—though and because ten years younger than I seeing none of my virtues which anyway had long been drowned under years of drugtaking and desiring to die, to give up, to give it all up and forget it all, to die in the dark star—it was I stuck out my hand, not she—ah time. "

― Jack Kerouac , The Subterraneans