Quotes About Existence

The days will always be brighter because he existed. The nights will always be darker because he's gone. And no matter what anybody says about grief, and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.

It seemed cruelly unfair to me, even then, how fast your life can change before you have an opportunity to rethink your choices. We should get second chances on the big stuff. We should come equipped with erasers attached to the tops of our heads. Like pencils. We should be able to flip over and scribble away mistakes, at least once or twice during the duration of our existence, especially in matters of life and death.

I try to find meaning anywhere I can. It's the only way I know how to validate my existence.

If I touch a burning candle I can feel no pain If you cut me with a knife It's still the same And I know her heart is beating And I know that I am dead Yet the pain here that I feel Try and tell me it's not real And it seems I still have a tear to shed

We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.

I've got a wonderful, pathetic little life that is precious to me.

All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages.

How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead

She'd say amazing things sometimes. Once you're alive, she'd say, you cant ever be dead.

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

She'd say amazing things sometimes. Once you're alive, she'd say, you can't ever be dead.

Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward.

Well right now,' she said, 'I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like . . . I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

It was the burden of being alive.

Time doesn't click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. When a wave breaks, the water is not moving. The swell has traveled great distances but only the energy is moving, not the waves. Perhaps time moves through us and not through it.

She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn't fair. People didn't have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she believed. That's how it was.

Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was.

jedoch spürt man auf ziemlich perverse Art, dass man dem Leben an sich ausgeliefert ist, weil es einen zwingt, zu atmen und zu atmen und zu atmen in einer endlosen Kapitulation vor der biologischen Routine, und dass das menschliche Streben nach Kontrolle ebenso viel mit der Machtergreifung über den eigenen Körper zu tun hat wie mit der Ausübung von Macht über andere.

I'm in the business of useless beauty, he says. And I'm happy with that. I don't think art needs an excuse to exist. We need beauty in our lives, so we don't go mad.