Vanity of Duluoz Quotes

“I realised either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world.

And of course I was right.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“...I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world.
And of course I was right.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...)

I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar...

...like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when they're only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“The more you study, the more you subsequently know; naturally, the more you know, the nearer you get to perfection as a journalist.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“Where is he tonight? Where am I? Where are you?”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“..history is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade...”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“I am not 'I am' but just a spy in somebody's body.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“I actually got so drunk I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl of the Scollay Square Cafe and got pissed and puked on all night long by a thousand sailors and seamen and when I woke up in the morning and found myself all covered and caked and unspeakably dirty I just like a good old Boston man walked down to the Atlantic Avenue docks and jumped into the sea.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“God bless child even when he get old.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

“No 'generation' is 'new.' There's 'nothing new under the sun.' 'All is vanity.”
― Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46