Jack Kerouac

Heirs leap screeching from doctors' laps while the old and the poor die on, and who's to bend over their bed and comfort.

It's only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love.

Mankind is like dogs, not gods — as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you — but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.

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), but I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's an 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 Dialectal propaganda and Comintern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar, assumes that the truth-teller is lying too.

If only I had the magic self of babyhood when I remembered what it was like before I was born, I wouldn't worry about death now knowing both to be the same empty dream.

My witness is the empty sky.

A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.

The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.

I could give you a list a mile long of the homosexuals in the arts but there's no point in making a big tzimis about a relatively harmless and cool state of affairs — Each man to his own tastes.

One night I realized that when you give people understanding and encouragement a funny little meek childish look abashes their eyes, no matter what they've been doing they weren't sure it was right — lambies all over the world.

I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.