Big Sur (2013)

Jean-Marc Barr: Jack Kerouac

Photos 

Quotes 

• Jack Kerouac : A man needs truth like a machine needs oil.

• Jack Kerouac : The sea seems to yell to me, "Go to your desire! Don't hang around here. 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 : All my tricks laid bare. Even the realization that there laid bare itself laid bare is a lot of bunk.

• Jack Kerouac : On the fourth day I began to get bored and noted it in my diary with amazement, "Already bored?"

• Jack Kerouac : What I do now next? Chop wood? I see myself as just doomed. An awful realization that I had 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. Not even really any kind of common sense animate effort to ease the soul in this horrible, sinister condition of mortal hopelessness. I hate to write.

• Jack Kerouac : No booze. No drugs. No binges. No bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody.

• Jack Kerouac : Neal doesn't like me drinking.

  Carolyn Cassady : Yeah. I don't like some of the things Neal does either.

  Jack Kerouac : We all have our something.

  Carolyn Cassady : Neal's something lives in San Francisco.

• Jack Kerouac : She's a big beautiful brunette in the line of taste you might attribute to every slanky, hungry sex slave in the world. But, also is intelligent, well read, writes poetry, a Zen student, knows everything, who is in fact just a big, healthy Romanian jewess who wants to marry a good hearty man and go live on a farm in the Valley.

• Jack Kerouac : I ask Lew and yes he's ready. And yes he's ready to go anytime. He's just following me like I often follow people myself. And, so off we go again.

• Jack Kerouac : It all adds up to the confusion that's beginning to pile up in my battered, drinking brain. Anyway, the constant reminders of death, not the least of which was the death of my peaceful love of Bixby Canyon, now suddenly becoming a whore.

• Jack Kerouac : You ought to go to Hollywood and play Billie the Kid.

  Michael McClure : What I'd rather do is go to Hollywood and play Rimbaud.

  Jack Kerouac : Well, you can't play Jean Harlow.

• Jack Kerouac : He chopped off his log with the fury of a Greek god.

• Jack Kerouac : I've got to make the best of it and not disappoint his believing heart. Because, after all, the poor kid actually believes that there is something noble and idealistic about this Beat stuff and I'm supposed to be the King of the Beatniks.

• Michael McClure : When I first read your book of poems, "Mexico City Blues," I turn around and I start writing completely differently. Everything changed, man. That book. It enlightened me.

  Jack Kerouac : Well, it's nothing like you do. In fact it's miles away. I'm a language spinner and you're an idea man.

• Jack Kerouac : Her voice is the main point. She talks with a broken heart. Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost groove. I just marvel and stare at her mouth, wondering where all the beauty is coming from and why.

• Jack Kerouac : Empty words! I realize I've been playing like a happy child all my life with words, words, words - in a big serious tragedy! Look around!

• Jack Kerouac : I'm just bound up inside like constipation. I can't move emotionally like you'd say emotionally as though that were some big, grand, magic, mystery everybody saying, "Oh, how wonderful life is! How miraculous. God's made this and God's made that!" How do you know he doesn't hate what he did? He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done! Oh, of course, that's not true.

  Billie : Maybe, God is dead.

  Jack Kerouac : No. God can't be dead because he's the unborn!

• Jack Kerouac : If I try to turn over, the whole universe turns over with me. It's no better on the other side of the universe.

• Jack Kerouac : I'll stay with Ferlinghetti at his home a few days and he'll smile and show me how to be happy awhile. We'll drink dry wine instead of sweet and have quiet evenings in his home. Ferlinghetti will say, "That's all there is to it. Take it easy. Everything's okay. Don't take things too serious. It's bad enough as it is without you going in the deep end over imaginary conceptions just like you always said yourself."

• Jack Kerouac : I'll get my ticket and say goodbye on a flower day and leave all of San Francisco behind and go home across autumn America and it will all be like it was in the beginning. Simple, golden, eternity, blessing all. Nothing ever happened. Not even this.

• Jack Kerouac : [final words]  Something good will come out of all things yet and it will be golden and eternal. Just like that. There's no need to say another word.

• Jack Kerouac : If you should ever top using that smile, how could the world go on?

• Jack Kerouac : That fish has all the death of otters and mouses right in it.

• Jack Kerouac : I'm carking in my canyon. Can you just do that for me... Everything is death.

• Jack Kerouac : Any drinker knows how the process works. The first day when you get drunk is okay. The morning after means a big head, but you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal. But if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk and wake up to keep the toot going and then continue on the fourth day, there will come a day when drinks won't take effect, because you're chemically overloaded, and you'll have to sleep it off, but you can't sleep anymore, because it was the alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights. So delirium sets in, sleeplessness, sweats, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares, nightmares of death.

• Jack Kerouac : How uninformed people can be thinking insane people are happy.

• Jack Kerouac : I don't want to scare Billie or anybody with my death scream. So I swallow the scream and just let myself go into death.

• Jack Kerouac : I've never screamed in my life. It's the first time I'm not confident I can hold myself together, no matter what happens. The devils come after me tonight.

• Jack Kerouac : Too many people now want to talk to us and tell us their stories. We've been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered. The circles closed in on the old heroes of the night.

• Jack Kerouac : I realized you can always study the character of a man by the way he chops wood.

• Jack Kerouac : I suddenly wonder if she's going to horrify the heavens and me, too, with a sudden suicide walk into those awful undertows. I see her sad blonde hair flying, the sad, thin figure alone by the sea, the leaf-hastening sea. You are my last chance, she said, but don't all women say that? Can it be I'm withholding from her something sacred just like she says? Or am I just a fool who will never learn to have a decent, eternally minded deep-down relation with a woman and keep throwing that away for a song and a bottle?

• Jack Kerouac : I want to go home and die with my cat.

• Jack Kerouac : Why bother grown-up men and poets at that with your own troubles?

• Jack Kerouac : It's exactly the size fit for putting a little dead Elliott in it. We've all read Freud sufficiently to understand something there.

• Jack Kerouac : The unbearable anguish of insanity. There's a tightening around the head that hurts. There's a terror of the mind that hurts even more.