logo

Quotes About Existence

You look until you see nothing tangible, and that is God.
~ Thomas Moore
Even if life as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that's nothing to worry about. Perhaps we can recognise it and just go on as before.
~ Thomas Nagel
I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
~ Thomas Nagel
The most radical conclusion to draw from this would be that your mind is the only thing that exists.
~ Thomas Nagel
Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
~ Thomas Nagel
Our idea of the things that exist is just our idea of what we can observe.
~ Thomas Nagel
There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.
~ Thomas Pynchon
the one Word that rips apart the day...
~ Thomas Pynchon
Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.
~ Thomas Pynchon
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Man, I want to die, is all,' cried Ploy. 'Don't you know,' said Dahoud, 'that life is the most precious possession you have?' 'Ho, ho,' said Ploy through his tears. 'Why?' 'Because,' said Dahoud, 'without it, you'd be dead.
~ Thomas Pynchon
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
~ Thomas Pynchon
He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.
~ Thomas Pynchon
If patterns of ones and zeroes were like patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
~ Thomas Pynchon
Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "?t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here
~ Thomas Pynchon
Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?
~ Thomas Pynchon
Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Is the Tube human? Semihuman? Well, uh, how human's that, so forth. Are TV sets brought alive by broadcast signals, like the clay bodies of men and women animated by the spirit of God's love?
~ Thomas Pynchon
Tío, quiero morirme, es lo único que quiero -gritó Ploy. - ¿No sabes -dijo Dahoud- que la vida es el bien más preciado que tienes? - Jo, jo -soltó Ploy entre lágrimas-. ¿Y eso por qué? - Pues porque sin ella -dijo Dahoud- estarías muerto. - Ah -dijo Ploy.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Duress is not an issue,— for life is a duress.
~ Thomas Pynchon
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. —WERNHER VON BRAUN
~ Thomas Pynchon
Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied [...]
~ Thomas Pynchon