And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little KitKat trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral unwatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a scene shifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep.

— Jack Kerouac

And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.

— Jack Kerouac

...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

— Jack Kerouac

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

— Jack Kerouac

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.

— Jack Kerouac

And rain will fall on our eaves.

— Jack Kerouac

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

— Jack Kerouac

And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.

— Jack Kerouac

And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.

— Jack Kerouac

And though Remi was having work-life problems and bad love life with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.

— Jack Kerouac