On The Road Quotes

“I didn't know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddammit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Am I making something worth while?
I’m not sure.
I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts,
but am I making something worth while?
I’m not sure.

There was a boy last night who I never spoke to because I was too drunk and still shy, but mostly lonely, and I couldn’t find anything lightly to say,
so I simply walked away
but still wondered what he did with his life
because he didn’t even speak to me
or look at me
but still made me wonder who he was
and I walked away asking
Am I making something worth while?
I am not sure.

I am a complicated person with a simple life
and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“I'm packing my life in a bag again, saying goodbye and writing the last letters. It's been a long journey, back and forth, hide and seek, but this time it's different. This time I am different. I'm not sure where I want to end up but I know how to get there, or at least the first direction, the first turn, the first sunset. I'm longing for peace. I'm longing for borrowed guitars and detachment. Horizons, cheap whiskey straight from the bottle and your hands in mine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“What's Your Road, Man?”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The whole town had instantly gone to bed; the only noise now was barking dogs. How could I ever sleep? Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. Lying on the top of the car with my face to the black sky was like lying in a closed trunk on a summer night. For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).”
― Jack Kerouac

“Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America....”
― Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli

“That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.”
― Sarah Vowell

“After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road. This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Con la aparición de Dean Moriarty comenzó la parte de mi vida que podría llamarse mi vida en la carretera”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“..'' ve kimse ama kimse bilmiyor kimseye yaşlanmanın perişan süprüntülerinden başka ne olacağını; ve ben Neal Cassady'yi anıyorum ve anıyorum, hatta asla bulamadığımız yaşlı babası Neal Cassady'yi; ve Neal Cassady'yi anıyorum. Neal Cassady'yi anıyorum.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Like seasonless fowl we migrate…
from East Coast to West Coast
and back and forth again,
for a job,
for a friend,
for a change,
for a kick.”
― Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel

“We’ve all got a dozen or so friends, haven’t we? And when we’re drunk we philosophise well into the night on an array of subjects ranging from what happened before the Big Bang to who would win a fight between a vampire and zombie, to what’s the most compromising position to be caught in, but we’re hardly going to be extolled in 60 or 70 years’ time as the Heat Generation or the Cheat Generation or the Street Generation, are we?

The Tweet Generation, maybe, but that’s about all.

So what was it about these few guys? Well, they wrote about what they did, and what they did was quite revolutionary back then. They went On the Road, and it was Jack Kerouac’s book that turned the tide.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Diamo e prendiamo e penetriamo in dolcezze incredibilmente complicate andando a zig zag da qualsiasi parte.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Quando lo trovai a Mill City quella mattina era piombato in uno di quei periodi depressi e infernali che arrivano ai giovanotti sui venticinque.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Çin mahallesinden gelen kızartma kokusu, North Beach'ten gelen spagetti sosu kokusu, Fisherman's Wharf'tan gelen yumuşak kabuklu ıstakoz kokusu, oh, hepsi nasıl da karışıp havayı tatlandırıyordu! Ya Fillmore'un şişte dönen pirzolaları? Market Caddesinin ateşten yeni inmiş fasulyeli çilisi, ayyaş Embarcadero gecesinin Fransız usulü kızarmış patatesi, körfezin karşı tarafındaki Sausalito'nun tütsülenmiş istiridyesi: işte benim ahlarla dolu San Francisco düşüm. Ve sis, insanı acıktıran sis, yumuşacık gecede titreşen neonlar, yüksek ökçeli güzelliklerin tıkırtısı, bir Çinlinin dükkanını süsleyen beyaz güvercinler...”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Az sonra bir de baktık, Oakland yakınlarındaki bayırlardayız. Ardından, bir noktada, o doyumsuz güzellikteki beyaz şehir San Francisco gözlerimizin önüne serildi: masmavi Pasifik'in kenarında onbir gizemli tepe, etrafında yama yama patates tarlalarından bir sis duvarı, akşamüstü saatlerinin dumanı ve altın rengi. "Nefes alışını duyuyorum!" diye bağırdı Dean. "Vay be! Başardık! Hem de tam benzin biterken! Su verin bana! Buradan sonra kara yok! Daha ileri gidemeyiz çünkü kara buraya kadar! Marylou, tatlım, hadi siz hemen bir otele kapağı atın. Sabah görüşürüz. Benim Camille'le konuşup birtakım şeyleri ayarlamam lazım biliyorsun, ayrıca demiryolundaki iş için şu Fransız'ı da arayacağım. Siz de Sal'la gazete alıp iş ilanlarına bakarsınız." Oakland Bay Köprüsüne varmıştık bile. Şehir merkezindeki işyerlerinin ışıkları yanıyordu, Sam Spade'i hatırladım. O'Farrell Caddesinde sendür sundur arabadan indik ve havayı koklayıp gerindik. Uzun bir deniz yolculuğundan sonra karaya ayak basmış gibiydik. Cadde altımızda sallanıyordu. Çin mahallesinden gelen yemek kokuları sarmıştı ortalığı. Arabada ne kadar eşyamız varsa çıkarıp kaldırıma yığdık.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Oh, man! man! man!" moaned Dean. "And it's not even the beginning of it-and now here we are at last going east together, we've never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE."Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, "Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there-and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! 'Well now,' " he mimicked, " 'I don't know-maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway . . .' Man, you dig all this." He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We drove to the ocean and smoked cigarettes until six in the morning when I fell asleep on your chest.
When you woke up I was gone and you went back to yours, and I keep having my best conversations while the world is asleep, trying to find myself somewhere between dawn and the sunrise.
Dear universe, may I never find myself.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Fuck Kerouac; he would write his own story.”
― Linda Collison, Looking for Redfeather

“The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.”
― Laurie Perez, Torpor: Though the Heart Is Warm

“Muscles relax, the mind expands. The vastness enters into the skin like a shot. ‘Our’ time dissolves.”
― Arianna Dagnino, The Afrikaner (161)