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f71d567
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They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to spend fifty bucks in three hours.
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Jack Kerouac |
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f759bf7
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The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual life is. All these people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don't know shit about matter, their heads are full of dreamy ideas and notions.
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Jack Kerouac |
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f9425f5
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Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
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religion
prude
sexuality
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Jack Kerouac |
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32e1545
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I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?
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skeleton
pride
jack-kerouac
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Jack Kerouac |
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f05ac20
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What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?" She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost."
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Jack Kerouac |
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e5745d1
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Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.
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Jack Kerouac |
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399157e
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The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks dont see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now. That's the story. That's the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they're all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s'why I'll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singin..
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Jack Kerouac |
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3d58ee8
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Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head but so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off but can..
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Jack Kerouac |
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1726db4
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The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.
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Jack Kerouac |
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31f668f
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How clear the realization one is going mad -- the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract.
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Jack Kerouac |
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dbfcbec
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You'll be sorry some day. Why don't you ever understand what I'm trying to tell you: it's with your six sense that you're fooled into believing not only that you have six senses, but that you contact an actual outside world with them. If it wasn't for your eyes, you wouldn't see me. If it wasn't for your ears, you wouldn't hear that airplane. If it wasn't for your nose, you wouldn't smell that midnight mint. If it wasn't for your tongue tas..
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Jack Kerouac |
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45d5bd1
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In the variety of the tone of her words, moods, hugs, kisses, brushes of the lips, and this night the upside-down kiss over the back of the chair with her dark eyes heavy hanging and her blushing cheeks full of sweet blood and sudden tenderness brooding like a hawk over the boy over the back, holding the chair on both sides, just an instant, the startling sudden sweet fall of her hair over my face and the soft downward brush of her lips, a ..
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Jack Kerouac |
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76dfbed
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I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!
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Jack Kerouac |
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c0e82e1
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Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we can't communicate them anymore and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books -- Too late, too late, the history of everything we've seen together and separately has become a library in itself -- The shelves pile higher -- They're full of misty documents or documents of the M..
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Jack Kerouac |
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42241f3
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And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words -- We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a million years -- The world being just what it is, moving and passing through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to complain about.
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Jack Kerouac |
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b53db82
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the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. Allen
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Jack Kerouac |
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ab3abe6
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So I rushed past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
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Jack Kerouac |
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5b9e6bf
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Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at..
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Jack Kerouac |
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a7714cb
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In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.
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Jack Kerouac |
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d179502
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What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.
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Jack Kerouac |
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545be76
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Japhy,' I said out loud, 'I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned it all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forev..
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Jack Kerouac |
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386691a
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The taste
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Jack Kerouac |
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70c7ed0
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In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood
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Jack Kerouac |
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2da8c44
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DEAR BABY, Isn't it good to know winter is coming--
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Jack Kerouac |
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56cd8d8
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and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.
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Jack Kerouac |
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95b9d77
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But there's no joy at all, people say "Oh well he's drunk and happy let him sleep it off"--The poor drunkard is *crying*--He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend, he's crying for help. (p.111)"
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cry-for-help
drunkenness
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Jack Kerouac |
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f8d84b7
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This was really the way my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.
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Jack Kerouac |
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5794724
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Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did.
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Jack Kerouac |
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637aefc
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I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.
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travel
gave-up
resign
forgiveness
drunk
beat-generation
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Jack Kerouac |
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2b50ed9
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And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)"
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unhappiness
paranoia
insanity
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Jack Kerouac |
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dc3fd51
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because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was "The pathway to wisdom lies through excess"
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Jack Kerouac |
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5fa06fb
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because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)
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reality
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Jack Kerouac |
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79f4165
|
This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read.
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Jack Kerouac |
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fd9ddd9
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I nudged myself closer to the ledge and closed my eyes and thought 'Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,' and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitt..
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Jack Kerouac |
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93feb18
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What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.
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Jack Kerouac |
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790034a
|
This can't go on all the time...all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.
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Jack Kerouac |
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783203b
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Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?"
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Jack Kerouac |
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a0bf3bf
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The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled. Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby - T..
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sex
fashions
word-sketch
jack-kerouac
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Jack Kerouac |
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b3a33cf
|
A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone.
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early-stories-and-other-writings
prose-poetry
the-poet
timeless
optimist
society
beat
jack-kerouac
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Jack Kerouac |
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2ef1faa
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Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind." But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off."
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Jack Kerouac |
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e50af72
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Something good will come out of all things yet--And it will be golden and eternal just like that--There's no need to say another word.
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Jack Kerouac |
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bc91e43
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I liked him; not because he was a good sort, as he later proved to be, but because he was enthusiastic about things.
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Jack Kerouac |
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e5e9261
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you know when i was a little kid in oregon i didn't feel that i was and american at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when i discovered buddhism and all i suddenly felt that i had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of the faults and sins in that lifetime i was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existen..
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Jack Kerouac |
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874ef68
|
I can hear myself whining again 'Why does God torture me?' - But anybody who's never had a delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility - The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when ..
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Jack Kerouac |