25 Wanderlust Quotes from “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac
The first book I would read on my RTW travel adventure needed to be epic, symbolic, energetic and hopefully inspirational. So I picked a book on meditation called, Wherever you go, there you are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. A fantastic book indeed, but not quite what I truly desired to begin my travels. Then, serendipity intervened. While up in the tranquil Sierra Nevada mountains at a hostel in Minca, Colombia, I pulled up a chair to the bar and ordered a fresh cup of coffee. As I was turning on the Kindle to read, an old worn out slightly tattered book caught my eye laying there on the bar amongst other books. I knew immediately this was the book I should be reading. I have known about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for years, and have been meaning to read it, but only now did I know why I hadn’t yet. It was because this was the moment that I needed this book. My Kindle didn’t turn on again for two weeks. On the Road is exactly the book I yearned for and fate slapped a memoir about an American road trip in the 1940’s on my lap deep in the secluded mountains of Colombia.
As hostel etiquette would have it, in order to take a book you must leave a book, and I didn’t actually have a book with me. So, taking a page directly from Kerouac’s own example, I “borrowed” the book with the full intention of buying another and adding it to the library of a deserving hostel along the way. Thus, I bought Paulo Coelho’s El Alquimista, in Spanish, to both practice with and to add to the hostel world library (as I conveniently like to think of it).
I’m not going to summarize the book, its characters or talk about the huge impact it had on American “beat” literature of the 1940’s and 50’s. I’m not going to talk about the author, his legacy or the completely original way in which he wrote in spontaneous prose on a continuous 120-foot scroll of tracing paper. Ok, I just told you a little, but I’m sure many of you have read the book and even more of you know of it. If you don’t know it, or if you haven’t read it, and if you have a wanderlust spirit somewhere inside your soul, then you may want to check it out. As a starting point or just supplemental material, below are some of my favorite quotes from the book. Some are inspirational, some are funny, and some are just plain mad, but they all are filled with the spirit of travel, adventure and the urging lust for life, love and freedom.
MY PERSONAL BOOK REVIEW (back cover testimonial style)
“I smiled with excitement and joy whenever I entered this beat universe of Sal Paradise’s off the wall adventures across the North American landscape… and it was a thrilling ride.”
― Chris, ChrisInTransit.com
“The way Jack Kerouac uses the language of the times is a trip down history lane, and still feels fresh, relevant and modern almost 70 years later.”
― Chris, ChrisInTransit.com
“Rarely have I read a book in which the descriptions are so original and vivid. I felt like I was in the passenger seat of a mad house cross county road trip.”
― Chris, ChrisInTransit.com
“Reading this travel memoir while I am just beginning my own travel adventure is exactly what I needed to get into the spirit of living and experiencing the randomness and beauty of the unknown road ahead.”
― Chris, ChrisInTransit.com
QUOTES FROM ON THE ROAD
“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.”
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“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
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“The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view”
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“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
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“I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
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“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
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“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
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“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’
‘Where we going, man?’
‘I don’t know but we gotta go.”
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“But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see?”
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“My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”
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“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”
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“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of the wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die…”
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“His friends said, “Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?” and Bull said, “I like it because it’s ugly.” All his life was in that line.”
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“I just won’t sleep,” I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”
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“Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”
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“For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.”
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“Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”
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“The road must eventually lead to the whole world.”
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“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.”
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“all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.”
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“There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.”
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“No matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”
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“…but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.”
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“Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
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“Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…”