Quotes About Existence

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.

this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith...We do not need to plan or devise a 'word of the future'; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us.

The environment," as we call it, is intimately with us. We're in it. It's in us. But also we are it, and it is us.

We live the given life, and not the planned. - 1994 III

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members.

it cannot be allowable for the government, on the pleading of some of the people, to establish a right solely for the purpose of withholding it from some other people. If this were to happen, it would amount to a punishment imposed on a disfavored group for no crime except their existence. I don't need to point out that this has happened before.

To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith.

The value of land, like the value of a life, is unreckonable and absolute.

But the earth speaks to us of Heaven, or why would we want to go there? If we knew nothing of Hell, how would we delight in Heaven should we get there?

I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember

If I destroyed what already existed, what would I replace it with? For something always exists before you get there with your desires and visions, and this simply had not occurred to me before in such a way that I could feel the truth of it. What did I have to offer?

The man of whom I once was pleased to say, "He is my grandfather," has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time.

I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

My Mind became the root of my life rather than its sublimation

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.

Bewildered in our timely dwelling place, Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.

We were created to be fully human - a lifetime effort - and using our minds intelligently and reverently is essential to full humanhood. But Rushdie talks throughout of making something sacred, whereas there is another kind of sacrality that exists of its own right.

man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born;