Jack Kerouac Quotes

Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

The worlds of Truth (love) and illusion (fear) are like parallel universes; with every thought we make a choice which one to inhabit

It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

Denial of death at some point becomes a delusion.

That which comes and goes, rises and sets, is born and dies is the ego. That which always abides, never changes, and is devoid of qualities is the Self.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

It's all real and it's all illusory: that's Awareness!

This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.

The world, life and human beings are only an illusion, a phantom, a dream image.

The first thing I would like to tell you about death is that there is no bigger lie than death. And yet, death appears to be true. It not only appears to be true but also seems like the cardinal truth of life - it appears as if the whole of life is surrounded by death. Whether we forget about it, or become oblivious to it, everywhere death remains close to us. Death is even closer to us than our own shadow.

I think there's more real in the unreal than there is in the real.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

Nothin’s real scary except in books.

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.