Jack Kerouac Quotes

It seems like the older I get, the more unreal the world becomes.

I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

I've lived in LA for so long, I don't even know what is real and what isn't any more.

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap bubble, Silly Putty thing anyway. In the universe people are in, people put their hands through the walls, and it turns out they're living in another century entirely. I often have the feeling — and it does show up in my books — that this is all just a stage.

I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?

Nothing was quite like it was supposed to be.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

If nothing is the way it seems, then this life is just a haunted dream.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

We're living in such a fantasy world where nothing makes sense anymore.

I feel like everyone I meet is an imaginary friend. I don't know. The older I get the more I wonder what's real.

This life we live is a strange dream, and I don't believe at all any account men give of it.

I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

Suddenly, I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to pretend I'm fooling the world when I'm not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I'm not doing a very good job myself.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.