“I woke up as the sun was reddening and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was-I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. “A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.” The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. Here’s our list of the 15 best quotes from Kerouac’s opus. Kerouac falls in love with every woman he sees, picks cotton in wayward fields, starves himself to delirium and documents every waking moment of it.

Hammered out in a haze of benzedrine binges and over sweating plates of apple pie, On the Road follows Kerouac (or, really, Sal Paradise, his fictionalized self-insert character) as he embarks on a series of road trips out west with his elusive, hot mess of a womanizing best friend, the two men in search of glory, God and a bigger, broader meaning of life. Both a cult classic and beloved Common Core teaching tool for angsty teenagers, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is a defining work of contemporary American literature and perhaps the poster child of the larger Beat movement.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac