Tag: Jack Kerouac

Burning

To take care of your life is to burn the flame of your life force in everything you do.–Dainin Katagiri, The Light That Shines through Infinity But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies,…

Hermitages

Turns out that all my final favorite writers (Dickinson, Blake, Thoreau) ended up their lives in little hermitages… Emily in her cottage, Blake in his, with wife; and Thoreau his hut… –Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, v….

Being Interested

When a cowhand got on the bus at Hugo, and smiled at all of us in there, a whole busload of people, I knew that he was more interested in mankind than 10,000,000 New School…

Compensations

In the last year I’ve been losing my words, evidenced at this site by my almost exclusive posts of one-liners by others (mostly by the saints and mystics). Rather than kvetch about this diminishment (…

Compelling

His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of old-time American heroes and orators.  Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about him, while the other poets were either…

Taking Stock

What have we accomplished?  Good new poetry, that oughta be enough. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, 472

Today’s One-Liner (#340)

Everybody should simply make a vow of kindness and let it go at that, try to stay sober too—start new party Vow of Kindness party. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen…

Today’s One-Liner (#325)

I believe in Buddha kindness and nothing else, I believe in Heaven, in Angels, I eschew all Marxism and allied horseshit and psychoanalysis, and offshoot therefrom. –Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, January 1958

Catholic Jack

As Kerouac aged, he reclaimed the Catholic identity he had inherited from his devout parents, although to the reader, the influence was often muffled under the Benzedrine and booze-fueled bacchanalia of his youth, especially when…