Jack Kerouac Quotes

In black America there's such a thing as passing, the black people who are light skinned and they will pass for white.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.

I felt this was my duty, my sole duty: to reconcile the irreconcilables, to draw the thick ancestral darkness out of my loins and transform it, to the best of my ability, into light.

An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

The candle is not lit To give light, but to testify to the night.

I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, - blown and flared by passion's storm, - and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

These blessed candles of the night.

The torches ran off, and I found myself in a forest, at night, without any light, on skis, and that was not fun - particularly because I was drunk. Luckily at some point I started to see the light of the ski lift. To be in the forest in the middle of the night, it's terrible.

In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

I like to get dark sometimes and then come back out into the light.

Pagford, which by night was no more than a cluster of twinkling lights in a dark hollow far below, was emerging into chilly sunlight.

Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.

I don't wanna be labeled as straight or labeled as gay. I just want people to look at me and see me as white.

Already with thee! tender is the night. . . But here there is no light. . .

Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.

Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. p493

It's not a cry you can hear at night. It's not somebody who has seen the light. It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I'd love to be able to sleep. I'll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me, Lord.