Jonathan Sumner > Jonathan's Quotes

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I don't wanta hear all your word descriptions of words words words you made up all winter, man I wanta be enlightened by actions.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“i wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico, or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call "do-nothing".”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums