Jack Kerouac Quotes

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

I do not know who I am tonight.

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, it could be that I've lost my way.

I am 33 years old, and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is, too; maybe our muddles are concurrent.

When people are struggling, that's a painful place to be in, to not know who you are and where you belong and what you desire.

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

Sometimes, I wonder what I'm doing here.

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

I still don't know quite what I'm supposed to do or be.

Even though my parents were famous actors, I honestly felt most of the time that I didn't understand what was going on.

I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

I don't know what I believe. I think there's a belief system, I'm just not sure what it is.

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

I know you love me, but I don't know why. I look at you and I just can't get why it's me. Every time I get my balance, I lose it again. Because it shouldn't be me, and I think it'd kill me if you ever figured that out.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

Charlie Brown: "Life is just too much for me... I've been confused right from the day I was born... I think the whole trouble is that we're thrown into life too fast... We're not really prepared..." Linus: "What did you want... A chance to warm up first?"

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

I think that I'm throwing but I'm thrown