Reading is a Bloodsport

We all agree it’s too big to keep up with, that we’re surrounded by life, that we’ll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it’s empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.

- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

…you get all these marvelous books a man ain’t even got time read em all, what you gonna do in this already piled up multiple world when you have to think of the Book of Songs, Faulkner, Cesar Birotteau, Shakespeare…

- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH..

- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

I want to tell them that we don’t all want to become ants contributing to the social body, but individualists each one counting one by one, but no, try to tell that to the in-and-outers rushing in and out the humming world night as the world turns on one axis. The secret storm has become a public tempest.

- Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris

That people actually understand what their tongues are babbling. And that eyes do shine to understand, and that responses are made which indicate a soul in all this matter and mess of tongues and teeth, mouths, cities of stone, rain, heat, cold, the whole wooden mess all the way from Neanderthaler grunts to Martian-probe moans of intelligent scientists..

- Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris

And besides they’re not there at all, only their bodies.

- Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

- Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris

…at the same time darkening at home there at my desk of well-being and thinking, ‘But cope that old psychoanalytic cope, she talks like all of em, the city decadent intellectual dead-ended in cause-and-effect analysis and solution of so-called problems instead of the great JOY of being and will and fearlessness - rupture’s their rapture - that’s her trouble, she’s just like Adam, like Julien, the lot, afraid of madness, the fear of madness haunts her - not Me Not Me by God.

- Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans

Bear with me all lover readers who’ve suffered pangs, bear with me men who understand that the sea of blackness in a darkeyed woman’s eyes is the lonely sea itself and would you go ask the sea to explain itself, or ask woman why she crosseth hands on lap over rose? no-

- Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans

She demanded the money, she was coming out of death and money was just the means to get the shiny brooch (the silly means invented by inventors of barter and haggle and styles of who owns who, who owns what-).

- Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans