Jack Kerouac Quotes

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

They say time flies, but you keep breaking it’s wings.

Father's Day makes me wish I could talk to my Dad just one more time, instead of all the time.

I don't need any drug to show me Heaven And I sure know how to spend plenty of time cleaning Hell But I'm missin' that feeling of falling.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

My Mama Moved Among the Days My Mama moved among the days like a dreamwalker in a field; seemed like what she touched was here seemed like what touched her couldn't hold, she got us almost through the high grass then seemed like she turned around and ran right back in right back on in

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washèd it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

... we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

Holding onto something that's gone only makes a sickness inside.

Funny, 'ow you can 'old a jewel in your 'and, and toss it away, and not even know what you 'ad until it's gone.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

When I thinkof my own native land, In a moment I seem to be there; But alas! recollection at hand Soon hurries me back to despair.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

The word 'home', it seemed, once learned, was a hard one to forget.

The Things that never can come back, are several- Childhood-some forms of Hope-the Dead- Though Joys-like Men-may sometimes make a Journey- And still abide-.

I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.