Quotes About Existence

To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.

And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye,.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.

Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo," Anjum said, "you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren't real. We don't really exist.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count? The happiness - does it count?

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It

Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is baqeeqat. Arre, even we aren't real. We don't really exist

You're the Imam Sahib, not me. Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All-Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements to take us away?

Not death. Just the end of living.

Morire divenne semplicemente un altro modo di vivere.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

The moment passed in a heartbeat. But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.

Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living.

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.

But the man I met--he is the love I had wanted to reach long before I knew that he existed, and I think he will remain beyond my reach, but that I love him will be enough to keep me living.

Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole.

For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

Loyalty, said Royce, "solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments — which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story.

It is much harder to measure how much more worth people find in being alive than how many fewer drugs they depend on or how much longer they can live. But could anything matter more?

This place where half of us will typically spend a year or more of our lives was never truly made for us.

So today, with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time.

help people in a state of dependence sustain the value of existence.