The Unknown Kerouac Quotes

“Goodnight gentle readers, sleep; sweet music to your dreams.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“Oh for an earnest sensitivity!—for someone like Sebastian again!—for more of that, and less of this critical malcontented sensitivity all around! And give me one, if miserable, to be sincerely miserable! For more men and women in my life, for the old friends to come back, for me to grow and die among persons I have always known!—this nomadic existence, this irreverent inconsequential time-dripping sun-slanting afternoon in the city suburb no more!—this lack of rich bloody dark life—this unmanly way to live—No Joy, No Beauty, Nothing!”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“Ah! you cliques of the city!—don’t you know you had forebears with handlebar mustaches, who came down to the river in the morning bearing masts and booms on their shoulders? who killed their own bulls with a mighty club? who made their own clothes and tilled their own earth? For a million of your clever fashionable phrases, would you exchange one single such accomplishment? I know I would—and Oh God but I’m just as futile as you are, you city vermin; I too am vermin, vermin trying to struggle back to manhood, with small success. Here is our second illuminative nugget, with no emotions this time: that the fear of the family album is pursuant to the city’s general fear of time and particularly of the past (“Oh the stupid Victorian 19th Century!” they keep crying, as though Victorianism were the whole sum of that great century). Fear of the past is in the city, thus a love, a frantic need of the present—with all the hedonistic overtones involved, the psychological doctrines of “alertness” and the so-called liberation of sexuality: in other words, giving the moment over to the dictates of sexuality (divorce is such a dictate) and leaving time, the future—which is to them equivalent to the past, as a moral factor rather than a hedonistic factor of the “pulsing present”—leaving the future to the dogs, childless marriages, or one-child “families,” broken-up families, and thus leaving the future of mankind and the race to the dogs: to the destruction at the hands of a society’s inward atom bomb of organic-familial-societal disintegration: in short, the end of a race, as in Rome. This fear of reaching back into the past, into lineality and tradition, and of extending similarly forward into the future, is like a plant drying up, dying. Where I say this, they speak of the “reality of the moment” and the danger of suppressing the urges of the moment for any reason—but I find good reason if it is to spell the continuation of our own cultural mankind. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want, like children who resent all brothers and sisters burgeoning in their mother’s womb, resenting the future after them, feeling they should be the last, final men, that none must follow—a childish emotion. But to give oneself over to childish emotions is the aim of these city intellectuals, they abstrusely find much to “scientifically” substantiate this desire in the cult of psychoanalysis and its sub-cults, the Orgone “Institute” for one splendid example, and so they go ahead blithely, and I am not the one to oppose their concepts, their march off the ship’s plank—since I am marching to a plank of my own, since I do not wish to be reviled as a neurotic and an atavistic neo-fascist, since the other night, when mentioning these objections of mine, a city intellectual had apoplexy right before me. Oh”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“HENRY MORGAN, the New York radio comedian, intellectual, sophisticate, “liberal” and whatnot, although being a very intelligent, clever and amusing person in himself, has more or less made his decadent views known on a variety of subjects through the medium of his radio work; and on the subject of family I gather this: A skit relates the horror of having to look through a family album of pictures, very well done, especially in delineating the horror which city men of the higher cognitive order have when they go through this routine. I have my sympathies with these high cognizers, but let us see how high it really is: I went through a family album tonight, with a magnifying glass, and heard my aunt relate histories, events, legends connected with the old forebears, and never before have I seen such glimpses into society, changing times, the law of families, lineal heritage and such; in no book have I ever seen so much, learned so much about human beings (if I may be permitted the phrase, Mr. Morgan and all ye sycophants). What does this mean, if it doesn’t mean that the so-called high consciousness, or complex understanding, or sensitive enlightenment, or whatnot of the city intellectual, is not high enough, or conscious enough, or complex enough, or understanding enough, or sensitive enough, or enlightened enough, or whatnot enough, if it is going to deny its vaunted intellectual powers a thorough and earnest study of the family album, with all the illuminative wonders and secrets therein, and all for the sake of fashionably shrinking back from the “Bourgeois horror” of such an album.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“On Contemporary Jazz—‘Bebop’” (from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947) focuses more intently on the effects of speed and virtuosity on stylistic changes in the jazz idiom, as embodied in the playing of figures such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—all of whom Kerouac had seen perform in New York’s Fifty-second Street jazz clubs by the mid-1940s. Flexing his talents as a music writer, Kerouac presents an informed, condensed jazz history of the 1930s and 1940s. He not only recognizes the significance of bebop’s modern, avant-garde revision of jazz’s compositional vocabulary, but views those compositional developments in rhythm and harmony as the virtuosic equivalent of the European classical tradition. If “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” displays Kerouac’s tendency at times to sentimentalize the premodern, this early essay on bebop valorizes propulsive, forward-looking art, the avant-garde abandon that came to characterize American expressive culture in the decades following World War II.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“The most religious moments of American life are undergone on Saturday nights.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“At seven little Leo was run over by an ice wagon, Marie Louise cradled her little brother in her arms, he was to be crippled for life. But a white haired 70-year-old hobo passing thru town, learning of the accident, came to the Duluoz house and offered his assistance in exchange for a meal and a lunch for the road. As everyone watched he kneaded the boy’s leg and made a few pulls and left him able to walk, no longer a cripple. “What is your name?” Tall and white-maned he flowed into eternity out of sight, across town and over the grass to the railroads, the hills; little Leo never forgot him. “Is it a saint?” “There’s an old savant for you—He came out of the mountains.” “He healed Ti Leo—” “Say what you want, me I’m going to say a little prayer—” Gray heavens lowering all around, standing in shirtsleeves by the old wood house, the Canadians nodded dumb heads in unison of sad mystery.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“mind filled with work and a soul fortified with the knowledge of the inevitability of loss—and so goodbye sweet journal, adieu calm book, may the best hearts find you.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“I would never write if I did not believe in the idea of living.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings

“The mad have unkind hearts.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings