Jack Kerouac Quotes

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it 'focused.'

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.

I'm just as sick as the others, although I prefer to do my sickness in private.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being 'alone': You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I'm talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.

My private life's quite sad.

The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.

An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.

Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.

I feel the madness creeping slowly. Loved by many I'm still lonely.

Most of the world's great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness... Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross.

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.

We live as we dream - alone.

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

This world that I live in is empty and cold/the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.