Quotes About Existence

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh had gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. [I think I made you up inside my head.]

I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

My hours are married to shadow.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

My heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident.

Water will run by rule; the actual sun / Will scrupulously rise and set; / No little man lives in the exacting moon / And that is that, is that, is that.

Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all.

No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God - or the universal woman-and-man - or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.

I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.

And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

Even in the days I feel the worst, I feel glad to be alive. To be a part of this journey called life. To be one of the lucky 7 billion. Why was I chosen to be here? I must have a meaning, right? There's a big picture already painted of my life, my legacy, my happiness. I just have to trust in it.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn't take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died