Jack Kerouac Quotes

I don't recognize my former self. Like I'm on the outside looking in at my life. Who is that guy?

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

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.

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am.

I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.

You get tangled up in your own ego of how you're perceived. You can lose your way.

I liked myself better when I wasn't me.

I'm sure I'm a schizophrenic. The problem is I can't tell the difference between which one's which, which one is the real me.

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.

If I'm a phenomenon, it makes me feel like I have no purpose.

I don't ever feel like anybody knows who I am.

I think I've always had a disconnect from what I'm supposed to be like.

When I look at myself, I see a person who strangely lacks what I consider the ingredients of a personality.

I've often felt I don't belong quite wherever I am.

I always felt different in a lot of ways and didn't really know how to express that.

I was a highly sensitive kid, sort of an old soul, and I felt like a lot of people in my peer group didn't fully understand me, or I couldn't fully be myself. I just wasn't engaged in a way that was fulfilling me.

As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.

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'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.

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

My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.