Jack Kerouac Quotes

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.

If you are not something, how do you become it? It is not obvious to me that you can be something you are not.

The wave does not need to die to become water. She is already water.

I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

All motion is relative. Maybe it's you who've moved away by standing still.

There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

But times do change and move continually.

Everything is so alive, that I can be alive. Without moving I can see it all. In your life I see everything that lives.

I've always been better moving than I am standing still.

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

All entities move and nothing remains still.

It may look like I'm moving but I'm standing still.

The becoming still can never be the being still; only with the death of becoming is there being.

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many -- myself and humanity in flux.

Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.

I think change is always a good thing. Change keeps things moving.

I have been moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine.

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

Things which don't shift and grow are dead things.

We all have the potential to move the world, and the world is ready to be moved.