Quotes About Existence

He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust

So that someone might want to put you in a book...So that you may be worth putting in a book...Live like a hero...Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?

We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?

To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

Von allen Abenteuern ist Selbstmord das literarischste, mehr noch als Mord.

All is allegory... Each creature is key to all other creatures.

Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.

as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say: it is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us.

When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.

To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being – not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation – a heavily affective sensation – of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world.

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?

No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.

Y qué es la verdad sino la manera en que son las cosas?

I remember asking John, after Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. 'There is always something or the other I am working on', he said. 'If I yield to the seduction of not working, what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself.

El dolor es la verdad, todo lo demás está sujeto a duda.

Den Staat kümmert nicht, ob der Bürger lebt oder stirbt. Wichtig für den Staat und sein Archiv ist, ob der Bürger am Leben oder tot ist.

Vergnügen ist Mangelware, aber an Schmerz ist heute überall ranzukommen.

I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy.

Aber vielleicht ist das die Natur des Todes, dass uns alles an ihm, jedes letzte Ding, unpassend erscheint.

El espacio es sólo espacio, la vida sólo es vida, igual en todas partes.

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

Trotzdem konnte er sich nicht vorstellen, sein Leben damit zu verbringen, Grenzpfähle in die Erde zu treiben, Zäune zu errichten, das Land aufzuteilen. Er sah sich nicht als etwas Schweres, das Spuren hinterließ, sondern allenfalls als einen winzigen Fleck auf der Oberfläche der Erde, die zu fest schlief, um das Kratzen eines Ameisenfußes, das Raspeln von Schmetterlingszähnen, das Taumeln von Staub zu bemerken.

We partake of the ideal but we also make poo.

He thinks: she had a life before I was born. He is glad for her sake, since she has no life any more.