25+ Important 'On The Road' Quotes By Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and leader of the Beat movement in the mid-1900s.

Kerouac is globally recognized for his novel 'On The Road', which is termed an American Classic. The novel has had a significant cultural influence on future authors.

Spontaneous prose is seen as Kerouac's specialty. The topics of his work range from easy-going topics like traveling, to hard-hitting subjects like poverty and religion. His work is said to be inspired by the popularity of jazz music that exploded onto the scene in the mid-1900s. The novel 'On The Road' comes from a journal he recorded of events occurring to him while he went on a cross-country trip.

'On The Road' is seen as an important piece of literature because it tackles topics like drugs, and lost youth, which was hardly ever brought to public attention in the '40s and '50s.

For more related content take a look at [Jack Kerouac quotes] and [Cormac McCarthy quotes].

‍

These sayings will make you want to go on a road trip yourself with a friend! Find the perfect Jack Kerouac 'On The Road' quote that inspires you from these great sayings!

1. “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 that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.”

― Jack Kerouac.

2. “And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm.”

― Jack Kerouac.

3. “I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

― Jack Kerouac.

4. “But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

― Jack Kerouac.

5. “The sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness.”

― Jack Kerouac.

6. “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.”

― Jack Kerouac.

7. “Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons.”

― Jack Kerouac.

8. “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.”

― Jack Kerouac.

9. “They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”

― Jack Kerouac.

10. “Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded.”

― Jack Kerouac.

11. “I made great mature speeches at the age of eight in front of interested lawyers. We were hot; we were going east; we were excited.”

― Jack Kerouac.

12. “So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.”

― Jack Kerouac.

13. “The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”

― Jack Kerouac.

14. “As in a dream we zoomed through small crossroads towns smack out of the darkness, and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands and cowboys in the night.”

― Jack Kerouac.

15. “I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

― Jack Kerouac.

16. “I had visions of a dark and dusty night on the plains, and the faces of Nebraska families wandering by, with their rosy children looking at everything with awe.”

― Jack Kerouac.

17. “We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the Plains.”

― Jack Kerouac.

18. “I envisioned wild complexities with Dean and Marylou and everybody - a season, a new season. First, we had to work to earn enough money for the trip.”

― Jack Kerouac.

19. “A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told me I was on the wrong road.”

― Jack Kerouac.

Here are some Jack Kerouac book quotes about road trips and journeys from his work 'On The Road'. These include Sal Paradise quotes and Dean Moriarty quotes.

20. “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye.”

― Jack Kerouac.

21. “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.”

― Jack Kerouac.

22. “We had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”

― Sal Paradise.

23. "What's your road, man? — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?"

- Dean.

24. “We began to sing songs. I was itching to get on to San Francisco.”

― Jack Kerouac.

25. “We’d made it, a total of nineteen hundred miles from the afternoon yards of Denver to these vast and Biblical areas of the world, and now we were about to reach the end of the road.”

― Jack Kerouac.

26. "Life is life, and kind is kind."

- Sal Paradise.

27. "Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken."

- Dean.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for 'On The Road' quotes then why not take a look at [nature quotes], or [Harper Lee quotes]?

‍