Best Quotes from At The End Of The Road by Jorge García-Robles with Page Numbers

My life is a vast and insane legend reaching everywhere without beginning or ending, like the Void.

Rather than solve problems, he relished or pondered them, like a good writer.

The journey, not the destination, became the goal of any journey.

The act of succumbing to this temptation led to the installation on American soil of the most frightfully starry-eyed country that had ever existed.

To be damned but not blind, that was both their sentence and their salvation.

When Jack stopped moving, he would begin dying.

The point was to weave experiences, unravel and reweave them, take to the road, and never settle down.

Young Jack's character was a mix of anguish and wanton exploit, introspection and feverish activity.

In God We Trust . . . but God is us, men of flesh and blood with the will to build our utterly earthly destiny.

Love God and write it.

"Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean [Neal] 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."

"There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say anything, just look, and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there."

"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. The atmosphere and I became the same."

"I witnessed a scene straight out of Lowry’s Under the Volcano: a white horse passed quite close to the head of a sleeping Neal, who noticed nothing, then disappeared. What was this horse? What myth and ghost, what spirit?"

"We exchanged our dollars for pesos, amazed by the quantity of Mexican notes they received...far from disappointing them, Mexico’s charms were a revelation."

"These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore—they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it."

"In Jack Kerouac’s America, material concerns prevailed over spiritual ones, the lower over the higher, civilization over culture."

"Jack had never really been interested in politics or social criticism, and he never passed judgment...What mattered to Kerouac was the souls of its denizens, their spiritual profile, not their social conditions."

"Kerouac appreciated this mixed Mexico that was neither an ancient culture nor a modern civilization but the typical historical graft of countries that arrive late to modernity."

"With a little help from the grass, Jack leaped onto another plane, unleashed from fragmented reality, to rock upon an ever-yearned-for spiritual substratum of inner harmony."

For the first time in his life began to write seriously.

The further you go away from the border, and deeper down, the finer it is.

There is no 'violence' in Mexico... that was all a lot of bull written up by Hollywood writers.

Dream on, Jackie.

Everything is perfect on the street.

I suddenly wake up in a trance in the church with my knees aching and a sudden realization that I've been listening to a profound buzz in my ears and head and throughout the universe.

I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but Infinite Nothingness.

Although nobody would publish his work, which led him to view editors with a jaundiced eye, Jack never doubted his literary worth or destiny.

This land is our land.

He desired to create that which would endure.

Old Dave died, a year ago—the Old Ike of Bill’s book.—His wife Is the most beautiful—wow—What an Indian and what a High priestess Billy Holiday.

It’s gloom as unpredicted on this earth, I realize all the uncountable manifestations the thinking-mind invents to place wall of horror before its pure perfect realization that there is no wall and no horror just Transcendental Empty Kissable Milk Light of Everlasting Eternity’s true and perfectly empty nature.

Here was a latter-day Raskolnikov in jeans infatuated with a streetwalking, long-suffering Mexican Sonia.

Both were pieces that failed to fit into society’s puzzle.

In Esperanza and the atmosphere that surrounded her Jack saw the proverbial arena of human suffering. Yet he also saw the possibility of transcendence, of breaching the barriers imposed by the world.

What’s more, Jack tells us in true Dostoyevskian fashion, it is within the murk of one’s personal life, in the lowest depths of depravation, that one can see the light of interior liberation.

You don’t know what in a hell you’re doing in this eternity bell rope tower swing to the puppeteer of Magadha, Mara the Tempter, insane.

Compassionate observer of this catacomb, this domain of pain and degradation, Jack exclaimed Buddhistically.

It was like a maguey plant: apparently sinister and aggressive but concealing a secret and redemptive pulp.

let’s shout our poems in san francisco streets—predict earthquakes!

In my mind’s eye I always remember Mexico as gay, exciting... the sweet glee of the voices of the women and children.

What do I care about Mexico City University, let me go sleep!

If you’d really seen a vision of eternity you wouldn’t care about influencing American Civilization.

It’s time for the poets to influence American Civilization!

This is insane!” I yell. “I’ll go with you to show you the Pyramids of Teotihuacan or something interesting, but dont drag me to this silly excursion.

I never dreamed it could be this bad.

This then was Jack’s final farewell to Esperanza Villanueva—the most conspicuous Mexican character ever tied to a Beat writer.

Jack didn’t stop writing. It took him two weeks to finish 'Visions of Gerard'.

...this is just a case of wanting to be robbed, a strange kind of exultation and drunken power.

It’s only in Mexico, in the sweetness and innocence, birth and death seem at all worthwhile.

There is never a shortage of astigmatic editors in this world.

Memère accepted and they took the bus.

Immediately we were in Mexico, that is, among Indians in an Indian earth.

A wave of faith welling up in her belly.

The mournful fervor was contagious.

She prayed daily for the fate of that long-suffering Mexican mother.

That afternoon they got a bottle of bourbon and polished it off in the bus to California.

On the soul-corroding threshold of fame.

His truth was not a matter of respecting the 'objectivity' of his experience.

My friends have died on me, my lovers disappeared, my whores banned.

Physical laws are millstones; if you cannot be the miller you must be the grain.

His survival instincts could not keep up with the speed and prowess of his discoveries, visions, and prophecies.

Jack was prey to the media, who treated him like a crazed misfit, a piece of merchandise to be sold.

In the end, life conquered them both and, sick of it all, they gave it the finger and raised their glasses to the only remaining retreat: death.

Better to vanish from an undesirable world that could not contain their energies, where their lust for life had proved insatiable and their passions never took root.

The paradox of Jack Kerouac the writer is that, instead of fleeing from his experiences, he attempted to re-create them.

In Kerouac’s books, depravation and the search for God are one and the same.

Jack made a Mexico to the measure of his inner chimeras and boiled it down to a fiction that helped him survive at the time.

For Kerouac, Mexico wasn’t so much a magical place as a form of therapeutic calisthenics.

There was no point in continuing to grant it such superlative qualities, no reason to dress it up in marvelous disguises.