On The Road: The Original Scroll Quotes
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."
"The writing of the novel, begun before Kerouac first travels on the road with Neal Cassady in December of 1948, is tested, broken, and changed by the subsequent transcontinental trips Kerouac makes with him that will in the end become the story of the book and that Kerouac faithfully records in his travel journals."
"What is life? What does it mean to be alive when death, the shrouded stranger, is gaining at your heels?"
"In so consciously disrupting our understanding of what it is we are reading when we read the original scroll version of On the Road, Kerouac’s claim that the book ‘marks complete departure from Town & City and in fact from previous American Lit’ seems justified."
"Life’s impermanence and the inevitability of suffering inform and motivate Kerouac’s heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to the phenomenal world."
"I wrote it with joy in my heart, and a conviction that somewhere along the line somebody will see it without the present day goggles on and realize the freedom of expression that still lies ahead."
"This urgency pushes Kerouac to strip his writing of ‘made-up’ stories."
"Kerouac’s clattering typewriter is folded in with Jackson Pollock’s furious brushstrokes and Charlie Parker’s escalating and spiraling alto saxophone choruses in a trinity representing the breakthrough of a new postwar counterculture seemingly built on sweat, immediacy, and instinct, rather than apprenticeship, craft, and daring practice."
"None of my characters travel 'in packs' or are a 'juvenile gang' ensemble or carry knives. I conceived On the Road as a book about tenderness among the wild young hell-raisers like your grandfather in 1880 when he was a youngster."
"The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie."
"I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America—for reasons which are never deeper than the music."
"It's not the words that count, but the rush of what is said."
"All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things."
"The best way, I think, to experience On the Road is sitting alone by a window, feeling the onrush of a poem, a painting, a song about to happen."
"One night in America when the sun had gone down."
"This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do."
"My prose is different, richer in texture."
"You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others including politicians and the rich and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way."
"What’s your road, man---holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?"
"Juices inform the world, children never know."
"He was reaching his mature decisions in the simplest direct way."
"We were all redeyed from the continual mistral-winds of old Tex-ass."
"They were great grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it."
"In the raw red dusk we said goodbye, on a bridge, over a superhiway."
"The dead bugs mingled with my blood, the live mosquitoes exchanged further portions, I began to tingle all over and smell of the rank, hot and rotten jungle all over from hair and face to feet and toes."
"Of course I was barefoot. To minimize the sweat I put on my bug-smeared T-shirt and lay back again."