Quotes About Existence

Some stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Other stories never end, maybe because they're alive.

But there's a world beyond what we can see and touch, and that world lives by its own laws. What may be impossible in this very ordinary world is very possible there, and sometimes the boundaries between the two worlds disappear, and then who can say what's possible and impossible?

I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

Capital T-truth is about life before death.

We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, 'What the fuck is water?' and swim away.

I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul.

It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water.

The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective. —David Foster Wallace "Good Old Neon" (2004)

So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them. I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all

The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate...

That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fair low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

David Foster Wallace