Jack Kerouac Quotes

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

Grey cloth coaxes the lime trees of friends shadowing berries dropped by the grateful earth.

Sure I believe in God and the Devil, but they don't have to have pitchforks and a long white beard.

Religion is one tree with many branches. As branches, you may say, religions are many, but as a tree, religion is only one.

Of course, there are questions that plague all of us. How did we get here? What happens when we die? Is there a heaven? Am I on the list? Who let the dogs out?

I touch God in my songas the hill touched the far-away seawith its waterfall.

I am interested in reconstructing symbols. It's about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.

Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors.

The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.

God, that checkroom of our dreams.

I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

The illuminated ones can take any form -- a man, a woman, a child, an elder, or even a dog. It is not inconsequential that the English language allows for the dyslexia of the spelling of the word dog: God spelled backward.

We project our ideas about ourselves into the heavens and call them ideas about God.

When the rose is gone and the garden faded you will no longer hear the nightingale's song. The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil. The Beloved is living; the lover a dead thing. If love withholds its strengthening care, the lover is left like a bird without care, the lover is left like a bird without wings. How will I be awake and aware if the light of the Beloved is absent? Love wills that this Word be brought forth.

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

Brahma is the great Creator, Life a mystic drama; Heaven, and Earth, and living Nature Are but masks of Brahma.

The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs.

Listen, sweet Dove, unto my song, And spread thy golden wings in me; Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing, and flie away with Thee.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.