Maggie Cassidy

Maggie Cassidy (1959) is a novel by Jack Kerouac that is a largely autobiographical work about Kerouac's early life in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1938 to 1939, and chronicles his real-life relationship with his teenage sweetheart Mary Carney.

Quotes

• I saw her, standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange.
  • Ch. 5

• It's only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love.
  • Ch. 7

• Heirs leap screeching from doctors' laps while the old and the poor die on, and who's to bend over their bed and comfort.
  • Ch. 13

• All in life, prime, young joy days, riches of sixteen, I sneaked off to the lazy unresponsive girl three miles across town by the tragic-flowing dark sad Concord.
  • Ch. 14

• I grieved inside that I had to give her up for Maggie. But I couldn't have Mary and Magdalene both so I had to decide my mind.
  • Ch. 20

• To my utter amazement I saw out of the corner of my eye the colored boy laid out almost flat on the floor in a low slung fantastic starting position, something impossibly modern and submarining and subterranean like bop, like the new gesture of a generation.
  • Ch. 21

• Fluting spring was racing through the corridors and ritual alleys of my sacred brain in holy life and making me wake and resurge to the business of being and becoming a man.
  • Ch. 33

• I'm sure gonna get you tonight — aint gonna be like it used to be with you — I'm gonna find out about you at last.
  • Ch. 46

• She laughed in his face, he slammed the door shut, put out lights, drove her home, drove the car back skittering crazily in the slush, sick, cursing.
  • Ch. 47, Final line.