Windblown World Quotes

“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. let men work and love and fight it off.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“Overpowered by the sadness of not knowing what there is in the world, and what I'm doing. Feeling completely indifferent to good and evil too, to beauty or anything else. I know that this is the root of all human troubles, all of them. Indifferent to that knowledge, too. Nothing got written.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“In a sense, I'm mad (and withdrawn from life) while they're sane, human, normal - but in another sense, I speak from the depths of a vision of truth when I say that this continual jockeying for position is the enemy of life in itself. It may be life, 'life is like that,' it may be human and true, but it's also the death-part of life, and our purpose after all is to live and be true. We'll see.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“The earth will always be the same - only cities and history will change, even nations will change, governments and governors will go, the things made by men's hands will go, buildings will always crumble - only the earth will remain the same, there will always be men on the earth in the morning, there will always be the things made by God's hands - and all this history of cities and congress now will go, all modern history is only a littering Babylon smoking under the sun, delaying the day when men again will have to return to earth, to the earth of life and God -”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! - and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! - high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“All the souls to explore! - It's not so necessary to love, really, as it is to settle something deep with all of those who really matter. Love and hate are the same things, differently sifted through personal... pride, or what have you... personal pride or even just personal-ness.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“And what do I think about? What thoughts do I have! - What thoughts! a whole host, multitude, and world of thoughts, I keep devising new ones and reworking old ones, some of the old ones are concluded and are only thought of as conclusions, whole worlds of new ones come crashing into my fingers, and it never ends.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“An art dies when it describes itself instead of life - when it turns from the expression of man's feelings in the void, to a mere description of the void.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“I wonder why our life must quiver between beauty and guilt, consummation and sadness, desire and regret, immortality and tattered moments unknowable, truth and beautiful meaningful lies.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“All I want from this book is a living, enough money to make a living, buy a farm and some land, work it, write some more, travel a little, and so on.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“It´s a sin how happy I can be living alone like a hermit.”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

“I have another novel in mind -- "On the Road" -- which I keep thinking about: about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don't really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.
[ -- 23 August 1948]”
― Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954