On The Road Quotes

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“When we are able to break free from the imprisonment of our little, small self-thinking and dare to face the essence of life, we recognize we are never at home with ourselves. We are always on the road. By challenging the unknown and the unidentified we are capable of opening our skyline. ("Transcendental journey")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

“I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—they were coming home from high school—but I had no time for thoughts like that…So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, were as big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The open road. Seemingly my only friend for years upon end since leaving war. The road embraced me, let me breathe, and more importantly, did not judge me.”
― M.B. Wilmot

“I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. He makes friends with self-destructing people like Dean Moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what I mean.

There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Non avevo niente da offrire a nessuno tranne la mia confusione.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howling off in to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.”
― Kerouac, Jack

“The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Man ain't safe going around this country anymore without a gun.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time." That's what Dean was, the Holy Goof.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“He was BEAT - the root, the soul of Beatific.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“New Orleans is a very dull town. It's against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and the mud and the molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all of my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American Night.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Dean's California - wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and ecentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“In that moment, too, he looked so exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt-some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain-that I drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“When you’re on the road, you don’t really have to deal with real life. It’s almost like hitting the pause button.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“These hours are numbered, I can't afford to waste any in transit.”
― Dessa, My Own Devices: Essays From the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love

“Why do I keep on drifting? Yes, I wish I knew why? I am not aware of the reason myself. Why do I keep on drifting?”
― Avijeet Das

“Neal is coming to New York.
Neal is coming to New York.
Neal is coming to New York for New Year´s Eve.
Neal is coming to New York for New Year´s Eve.
Neal is coming to New York for New Year´s Eve in a ’49 Hudson.
[ca. December 16, 1948]”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“On the Road" by Jack Kerouac is a favorite book that I love reading. I spend most times alone.”
― Avijeet Das, Why the Silhouette?

“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

Feeling close to Jack Kerouac as I am back to traveling again. The road and the sky feel full of life.

Vis ta vie!”
― Avijeet Das

“New Year Way Out by Stewart Stafford

Take off down the truculent highway
For a well-earned New Year escape
Tasty lunch at some time warp hotel
Seedy tree in an old folks dining room.

Destination reached in crimson twilight
Friends from back in the day greet us
Bags dragged in, up and put in corners
Then, downstairs for a seafood dinner.

Catch up on all the gossip and chat
Take a moonlight walk on the beach
Crabs roam the sand as sleep comes
Routine fractured in grinning dreams.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford