Quotes About Existence

It's always night, or we wouldn't need light. —

God's indifferent sunlight in all its bleaching and terror.

Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before we can make any attempt to deal with the past.

Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did.

Doubt is the essence of Christ.

We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

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." "Oh," said Ploy. He thought about this for a week.

Aye, some of us have never seen him, only heard his steps on the nights when there is no Moon, or his voice, speaking from above the only words he knows,— 'Eyeh asher Eyeh,' "—in on which, in Tones hush'd, though ominous, the others now join. "That is, 'I am that which I am,'" helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv. with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint from the Smoke of his Pipe.

Reality does not go away when it is ignored.

The question as to whether flesh-and-blood people of indigenous ancestry today would have been better off had the Europeans not invaded can scarcely be asked, much less answered, because most flesh-and-blood contemporary American Indians would not exist if the Europeans had not invaded, since they are of European as well as indigenous ancestry. Nature is remarkably uncooperative with our moral categories. There is no way to unscramble an egg.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

I have faded into the habit of secretly existing under your skin. It is unbelievably dark under there; I am happy.

Not at all; I don't believe in the human soul. I never have. I believe that people are like portmanteaux—packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle.…

Do you think there will be Mondays in heaven?' (...) 'Heaven will be one long Monday'.

To be alive and to be a 'writer' is enough.

Hay vida en todas partes, hasta en el fondo del mar. Y por todas partes la extingue la estupidez humana

Los hombres dicen que el tiempo pasa....el tiempo dice que los hombres mueren

La foi en la vie c'est de croire qu'il existe et qu'il y a une place pour toi derrière le brouillard

The human mind is woven into the energy fabric of the universe. John A. Wheeler

It doesn't come up ever, and yet it comes up always.

The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life. . . . Concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence, usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to "awaken" to deeper realities, truer realities.4

You could cut off my hand, and I would still live. You could take out my eyes, and I would still live. Cut off my ears, my nose, cut off my legs, and I could still live. But take away the air, and I die. Take away the sun, and I die. Take away the plants and the animals, and I die. So why would I think my body is more a part of me than the sun and the earth?

We must live according to the principle of a land ethic. The alternative is that we shall not live at all.

I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. I don't know what sorrow does to the world, what it adds or takes away. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.