Quotes About Existence

It would be exaggerating to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his literature and that literature justifies me…. I don't know which of us is writing this page.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Life itself is a quotation.

Yo soy quien libre me vi, yo, quien pudiera olvidaros: yo soy el que, por amaros, estoy, desque os conocí, sin Dios y sin vos y mí.

Ich hatte mit aller Macht meines schnell zirkulierenden Blutes gespürt, dass mein Tod diesen Baum nicht seiner strahlenden Schönheit berauben würde, dass er die Welt nur meines Blickes berauben würde. (I had felt with the might of my fast circulating blood that my death would not rob this tree of its irradiant beauty, it would only rob the world of my gaze.)

For death is personal only for the person itself, that is to the extent it is accepted, embraced, it can be personal for him, and for only.

La mort n'est pas un évènement de la vie. La mort ne peut être vécue », avait écrit ce con de Wittgenstein.

The end of the world had already occurred. How long ago was that. I don't know. It is not a function of knowledge. It is in a special sense that the world ends. You have to keep living.

There is a feeling the body gives the mind of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling without the sense that you are passing through one world, that you could reach another anytime. Instead the real is crossing you, your body an arrival you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between these geese forever entering and these spiders turning back, this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.

that we be founded on infinite smallness

stilling—very still—breathing into this oxygen which also pockets my looking hard, just that, takes it in, also my thinking which I try to seal off, my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot go somewhere else than this body…

The future without days. Without days of it? in it? I try to—just for a second—feel that shape.

Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this post. Something goes away, something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of one. But patiently you travel it. Your self.

The pleasure of travel - existing as it largely does only in recollection and almost never in the present, at the actual moment when it is taking place- Besides, he considered travel to be pointless, believing that the imagination could easily compensate for the vulgar reality of actual experience.

He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street,—everywhere when we came to think of it?

Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.

It did not budge at all and he tapped it. The animal was dead. Doubtless accustomed to a sedentary existence, to a humble life spent underneath its poor shell, it had been unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it, the rutilant cope with which it had been covered, the jewels with which its back had been paved, like a pyx.

No estoy enamorado de ti. Ni siquiera despiertas en mí una de esas nostalgias aberrantes que los hombres de mi edad sienten con la proximidad de una vida joven: eres un ser inferior, Iris Mateluna, un trozo de existencia primaria que rodea a un útero reproductor tan central a tu persona que todo el resto de tu ser es cáscara superflua.

Yo no entiendo, Madre Benita, cómo usted puede seguir creyendo en un Dios mezquino que fabricó tan pocas máscaras, somos tantos los que nos quedamos recogiendo de aquí y de allá cualquier desperdicio con que disfrazarnos para tener la sensación de que somos alguien (...)