Quotes About Existence

But the living must fear death, or they would not struggle to stay alive. from 'The Fallen Kings.

He guessed he wouldn't mind being a book. Books just did what they were made to do, like stars just shining out in case anyone cared to look.

He felt […] as if he'd just gotten a letter, out of the blue, from somebody wise enough to know the truth, from everybody, or at least everybody who mattered. "Hello," the letter said. "Hello, Jeff Greene, I've been watching you and I like you and I want to know you better. This is just to say I'm glad you're alive in the world." The list of signatures, he thought, would include his own.

It was almost as if he'd been a ghost in all those rooms, all those days, a ghost in his own life.

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)

He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.

Now, must she admit that he individual was an illusion and a falsification? There was no such animal. Except in the mechanical world. In the world of machines, the individual machine is effectual. The individual, like the perfect being, does not and cannot exist, in the vivid world. We are all fragments. And at the best, halves. The only whole thing is the Morning Star. Which can only rise between two: or between many.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

Do you think that creation depends on MAN! It merely doesn't. There are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a human-less world. Man is a mistake, he must go. There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn't interrupt them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice.

Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.

I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.

There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another. Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition...You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is." —D. H. Lawrence, Pansies

And he could go on in life, existing from day to day, without connection and without hope. For he did not know what to do with himself.