Quotes About Existence

In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death.

We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless.

In the beginning there was Dust, and in the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust!

I am sustained by Being Necessary.

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand. I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive. There is only one verb that matters: to be.

What's the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend? Death sticks around.

A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it." A

I lost sight of myself so long ago that I'm hesistant to try to find myself. I'm afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations. I'm so afraid to be me.

everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living.

The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.

there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.

And in my dream, if the fathers and mothers loved their sons and daughters and sang to them in their cradles, they made a good country, and if they didn't, they made a tyranny, so whether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.

The dead know how to savor as the living never can.

Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.

You carry your death in every cell of you. Every tiny mote in your body is dying, faster than sleight of hand. You are always dying, every second. How could I take that out of you?

People are clocks who think they wind themselves.

It's not nihilism is there's really no point to anything.

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn't it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

But the birch tree reminded me of how large the world was and how unimportant was my place in it. It became a reminder: to let things be what they were, to live unsentimentally. To pare away the unnecessary neuroses, the compulsion to be at the center of every thought; to look at the world without the intervening lens of self.

research project would not exist. It is not our purpose

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.

I have struggled to prove myself into existence.

Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it's internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence.

humor is godless and entirely human since humor runs counter to the sublime: instead of transcending, you are made acutely aware of the skin in which you exist.