Quotes About Existence

Idle to pretend that we have lost paradise. We never had it; it is still to make.

We are living now. We shall not live long. No one should tell us we shall live again. This is our little while. This is our chance.

If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are among the living, but can you be certain?

Nancy Mairs, a contemporary thinker about disability and dying, wrests with "the psychological 'undeadness' of the dead—a consolatory consciousness of the beloved as present though elsewhere." Such a conviction reflects faith in death as the end of personal consciousness but the beginning of a translation "into an existence no less authentic for my inability to read it.

life without the finitude of death—the inconceivable finality of one's own death—would be intolerable.

I want the quiet concentration of each everyday task to fill me with an active love of living and a passive acceptance of dying

I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everthing. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest.

This is what it meant to be human-to die. And I,who had been made of death, still had no part in humanity.

Do people look at me and see horror lurking just beneath this tattered skin? Or is it the reverse? Do they see that something is missing? the spark of divinity that makes a life human? I am a void, a chaotic abyss, that would swallow up the world.

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

Now faith is not what we hereafter have we have a world resting on nothing Rest was never more than abstract since it is empty reality we cannot escape

We got up and smiled at each other. His eyes were lovely, and I was reminded of a line in a book I read once, that God exists in the spaces between people.

I don't even recognize that life and the person living it from my spot on this bed.

Life is real, in all its complexity. And though it can be painfully difficult, it can also be unspeakably wonderful.

It's as if the body is a candle and the soul is its flame. When the flame is snuffed out, all that is left to prove that there had been a flame is the candle

I smiled at this because some days I feel as though I've already lived several lifetimes and others as though I haven't lived any kind of life at all, that I'm still waiting for it to start. Or waiting for it to start over.

We are, all of us, living out the stories of our lives. Each of our stories will end, in time, but meanwhile, we fill the pages of our existence with all the love we can, for as long as we can. This is how we make a life.

sublimely human, isn't it? Not unsullied genetic

We shouldn't think for a moment that just because their lives are short they shouldn't be here.

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

Time is the narrow footpath in eternity which we walk in our magical, momentary bodies.

Is reality exhausted by what is, or does it leave room for all that could be?

We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it.

By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is not your world, and you don't have another. (p.107)