Quotes from On the Road
by Jack Kerouac

"'you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict'"

"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."

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

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life."

"He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being."

"He rubbed his jaw furiously, he swung the car and passed three trucks, he roared into downtown Testament, looking in every direction and seeing everything in an arc of 180 degrees around his eyeballs without moving his head."

"'we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.'"

"Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven."

"This is the night, what it does to you, I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

"It was the myth of the rainy night."

"It made me think that everything was about to arrive--the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever."

"we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move."

"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-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

"Where go? what do? what for?--sleep. But this foolish gang was bending onward."

"He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives"

"the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives."

"He was so excited it made me cry."

"we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."

"the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years. I shouldn't have said that...he likes to eat so much...He's never left his food like this..."

"'Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be.'"

"'He's mad,' I said, 'and yes, he's my brother.'"

"'Oh a girl like that scares me,' I said. 'I'd give up everything and throw myself on her mercy and if she didn't want me I'd just as simply go and throw myself off the edge of the world.'"

"I turned to watch the kitchen light recede in the sea of night. Then I leaned ahead."

"It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul--which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road--calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened."

"Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do."

"Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. 'What do you want out of life?' I wanted to wring it out of her. She didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted."

"'What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?' She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely and lost."

"All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convulated among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? 'Don't bother me, man, I'm happy where I am. You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-nine. What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?'"

"anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind."

"'What's your road, man?--holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?' We nodded in the rain."

"and you know that it doesn't matter and we know time--how to slow it up and walk and dig and just old-fashioned spade kicks, what other kicks are there? We know.' We sighed in the rain."

"I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance."

"Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight. I gaped into the bleakness of my own days. I had an awful long way to go too."

"'Howd'y'do. My name is Dean Moriarty. Yes, I remember you well. Is everything all right? Well, well. Look at the lovely cake. Oh, can I have some? Just me? Miserable me?' Ed's sister said yes. 'Oh, how wonderful. People are so nice. Cakes and pretty things set out on a table and all for the sake of wonderful little joys and delights. Hmm, ah, yes, excellent, splendid, harrumph, egad!'"

"He had no idea of the impression he was making and cared less. People were now beginning to look at Dean with maternal and paternal affection glowing in their faces. He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he would become"

"I had finally found the castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up."

"Here were the three of us--Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing from his old one, and going off into the night together."

"Here we were, heading for unknown southern lands, and barely three miles out of hometown, poor old hometown of childhood, a strange feverish exotic bug rose from secret corruptions and sent fear into our hearts."

"We passed Walsenburg; suddenly we passed Trinidad, where Chad King was somewhere off the road in front of a campfire with perhaps a handful of anthropologists and as of yore he too was telling his life story and never dreamed we were passing at that exact moment on the highway, headed for Mexico, telling our own stories. O sad American night!"

"On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows--and still we rolled."

"'Yes I heard what she said, I certainly damn well did, oh me, oh my, I don't know what to do I'm so excited and sweetened in this morning world. We've finally got to heaven. It couldn't be cooler, it couldn't be grander, it couldn't be anything."

"As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of 'history.' And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment."

"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 in amazement. In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean's figure, and he looked like God. I was so high I had to lean my head back on the seat; the bouncing of the car sent shivers of ecstasy through me."

"Victor mournfully looked down at his angel. We all wished we had a little son like that. So great was our intensity over the child's soul that he sensed something and began a grimace which led to bitter tears and some unknown sorrow that we had no means to soothe because it reached too far back into innumerable mysteries and time."

"In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach."..."At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen."

"and somewhere I heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh daydream in heaven."

"'Look at those eyes!' breathed Dean. They were like the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus."

"Life was dense, dark, ancient."

"They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and road sand reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way."

"'Man, man,' I yelled to Dean, 'wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can tell!'"

"Twelve hours later in my sorrowful fever I finally came to understand that he was gone. By that time he was driving back alone through those banana mountains, this time at night."

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."