Quotes About Existence

Their crime was their existence, Louisa had obliquely understood, and she had heeded Mama's plea that they must not make a noise, taking each blow soundlessly, keeping her tears on the inside, until the lake of her grief had become so wide it had seemed almost inviting, a thing into which she could escape.

A "B" when you (be - here) and a "B" when you (be-gone ).

Day does not forestall nightmares - Night is not needed for dreams - There is no better time than here - No better place than now -

Except for the memories of his daughter and his son it was already as though he had never existed.

Dreaming's shit, but dying's worse; and watching someone die, that comes somewhere between the two, I guess. It ain't good, but it's got to be better than the other thing, better than doing it yourself. Hasn't it?

And if there are gods after all, perhaps we should not struggle so hard to get their attention, if this is the attention they would lavish upon us.

As far as the Internet was concerned, it didn't exist. And in this day and age, if the Internet says it doesn't exist, it's either dead boring or totally fascinating in a top secret men-in-black kind of way.

That sound . . . that sound, it came from his mouth. It was the song of something dying. Something that never did live.

They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn't safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.

Do you believe in reincarnation?" I asked as we looked together at the intricate drawings, reading bits about them in the paragraph of text on each page. "I don't," he said. "I believe we're here once and what we do matters.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding.

Be present for your own life.

It's reality. And reality is what we have to accept, like it or not.

An arrow pointed into its center, above which were written the words YOU ARE HERE. This image had become ubiquitous on T-shirts as well as posters and I always felt mildly irritated by it, unsure of how to take it, whether it was meant to be comical or grave, to indicate the largeness of our lives or the insignificance.

Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

I felt it in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.

That mystery is not the curse of our existence; it's the wonder. It's what people are talking about when they talk about the circle of life that we're all part of whether we sign up to be or not—the living, the dead, those being born right this moment, and the others who are fading out.

Or rather, it's a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion.

Nancy According to astronomers, every atom in my body was forged in a star. I am made, they insist, of stardust. I am stardust braided into strands and streamers of information, proteins and DNA, double helixes of stardust. In every cell of my body there is a thread of stardust as long as my arm.

The mediocrity principle establishes our worth as equal to that of the universe.

We are all creatures of myth, shadowed by archaic images of life and death.