Quotes About Existence

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing.

Only a few months into our marriage, writes the grandfather, we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.

What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.

Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn't exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

How did her life live itself without her.

In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

If god exists, he is not to be believed in.

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.