Jack Kerouac Quotes

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 Name: Jean-Louis Kerouac
 A.k.a.: Jack Kerouac
 Occupations: Novelist, Poet, Painter.
 DOB: March 12, 1922
 DOD: October 21, 1969
 Nationality: American.
 Genres: Beats Poets.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. 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. Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars. I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry. Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream. The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered 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 emptiness. I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. It all ends in tears anyway. Will you love me in December as you do in May? Something good will come of all things yet Don't touch me, I'm full of snakes. Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and laugh... I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted. If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together. Pain or love or danger makes you real again... All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land. Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end. There are worse things than being mad. Love is all.