Quotes About Existence

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

Patchway had the enviable countryman's capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

Oh Irina, there's so much life for us. Is there? I feel I have no life. There's nothing in front of me but a black wall.

Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.

Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live.

I don't think she's had much of a life. Well, a life is a life. What does that mean? One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.

And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.

I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.

And he thought, I shall go on blindly and secretly jumbling all these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some such inescapable burden. That is being human. A very weird affair.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning, and that is what I am experiencing just now.

And could it be true without other awful things being true as well?

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage…

Is your father writing a book? said Alison. No. He's existing. Some people live, like the rest of us, like the people in your plays. He just exists.

Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of 'Help me!' — but there was no one there.

It's all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it's all too hard.

All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes

Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there?

Why does one never see dead birds? How can they all hide to die?

Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.

Time had never been visible to him before.

We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.

Prose literature can reveal an aspect of the world which no other art can reveal … and in the case of the novel, the most important thing to be thus revealed, not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist.

In a way it does not matter where I am. In another way where I am is fated.