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'On the Road' Quotes

Jack Kerouac's Autobiographical Novel

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On the Road

On the Road

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  • "What's your road, man?--holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow."
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 1

  • Here was a young kid like Dean had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; no native strange saintliness to save him from the iron fate."
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 2

  • "We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest. Hotrods blew by. San Antonio, ah-haa!"
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 4

  • "Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic."
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 5

  • "In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean's figure, and he looked like God."
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 4, Ch. 5

  • "I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, "Go moan for man," and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimmage on foot on the dark roads around America?"
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 5

  • "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it... and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?"
    - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 5

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