“The only people that interest 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 like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” “What difference does it make after all?-Anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? What’s earth? All in the mind.”

“As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, ‘Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven.’” “My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. I wasn’t scared I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” “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, 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. “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. Here’s our list of the 15 best quotes from Kerouac’s opus. Kerouac falls in love with every woman he sees, picks cotton in wayward fields, starves himself to delirium and documents every waking moment of it. Hammered out in a haze of benzedrine binges and over sweating plates of apple pie, On the Road follows Kerouac (or, really, Sal Paradise, his fictionalized self-insert character) as he embarks on a series of road trips out west with his elusive, hot mess of a womanizing best friend, the two men in search of glory, God and a bigger, broader meaning of life. Both a cult classic and beloved Common Core teaching tool for angsty teenagers, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is a defining work of contemporary American literature and perhaps the poster child of the larger Beat movement.

On the road by jack kerouac