#kerouac

We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#goodbye #kerouac #love #love

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat-generation #jack-kerouac #mind #self #self-awareness

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#love

Mientras duermo los tres se van (hacen bien) a la playa, en el coche de Sand, a treinta kilómetros de la casa; los muchachos se zambullen, nadan, Mardou se pasea por las orillas de la eternidad, mientras sus pies y los dedos de sus pies que yo tanto amo se imprimen en la arena clara, pisando las conchillas y las anémonas y las algas secas y empobrecidas, lavadas por las mareas y el viento que le despeina el cabello corto, como si la Eternidad se hubiera encontrado con Heavenly Lane (así se me ocurrió mientras estaba en la cama). (Al imaginarla por otra parte paseándose sin rumbo, con una mueca de aburrimiento, sin saber qué hacer, abandonada por Leo el Sufriente, y realmente sola e incapaz de conversar acerca de todos los fulanos, menganos y zutanos de la historia del arte con Bromberg y Sand, ¿qué podía hacer?) ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#mardou #the-subterraneans #art

A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#jack-kerouac #memory #vision #writer #writing

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language. ↗

— Sterling Lord

#language #writing #home

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#atop-an-underwood #beat #inspirational #jack-kerouac #locomotive

I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved. ↗

— Joyce Johnson

#kerouac #love #rescue-mentality #sacrifice #love

He had never felt anything like that before - yet somehow he knew that from now on he would always feel like that, always, and something caught at his throat as he realized what a strange sad adventure life might get to be, strange and sad and still much more beautiful and amazing than he could ever have imagined because it was so really, strangely sad. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beauty