After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.

— Jack Kerouac

After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living,' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds...

— Jack Kerouac

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

— Jack Kerouac

All I wanted, and all Neal wanted, and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives in NY were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffer's before they made the drunkard's train to Westchester---but without hangovers.

— Jack Kerouac

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

— Jack Kerouac

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).

— Jack Kerouac

A man cannot impart the true feeling of things to others unless he himself has experienced what he is trying to tell of.

— Jack Kerouac

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going, and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else...

— Jack Kerouac

And all the insects ceased in honor of the moon.

— Jack Kerouac

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgery mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by rocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunch pail and lantern, limping, refaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliage sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, creating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.' Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

— Jack Kerouac