Quotes About Existence

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.

When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too.

His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.

I know that to be female is an older thing even than to be human. I want to be as old as I can be.

A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.

You might think that fingerprints and numbers give you a distinct identity. But soon there will be no identity so distinct as simply to have none.

He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are.

He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he'd been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was.

When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.

I want the dead to be dead forever. I don't want to be one of them, Except of course you can't be one of them. You can't be one of the dead because that which, has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it-- blackness, aloneness,silence, peace, and all of it only a heartbeat away. [ The Sunset Limited - 2011 ]

The breath of God was his yet, though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us.

People always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.

I no longer have an opinion about reality. I used to. Now I dont. The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever. To the extent that you refuse to accept that then you are living in a fantasy.

How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning.

War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is God.

Where man can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone.

The judge is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. ... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way... War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god... Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.