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"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

— Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)

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More quotes by Jack Kerouac

The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.

Book of Dreams (1961)

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

On the Road (1957)

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

Pomes All Sizes (1992)

All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.

Visions of Gerard (1963)

Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?

All Jack Kerouac quotes →

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jack Kerouac (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.