Quotes About Existence

Reality doesn't surprise me. But that's not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the "thing to really happen" that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination.

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

What I'm writing to you is not for reading— it's for being.

And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.

Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.

I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.

Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.

How living hurt. Living was an open wound.

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.

She exists as in dreams. She has no sense of reality. She gets nervous because people are always interrupting her daydreams.

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.

I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.

Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it.

I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.

But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is. I am at its core. I still am. I am at the living and soft centre. Still. It sparkles and is elastic.

the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is.

It's hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I'm bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I'm still to be born and I can't quite manage it.

I am finding myself: it's deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I'll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I'll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as life said the following: and there simply was no following.

Esta é a vida vista pela vida. Posso não ter sentido mas é a mesma falta de sentido que tem a veia que pulsa.

I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live; lost in time and space.

La consuelo haciéndole entender que también yo padezco la vasta e informe melancolía de haber sido creado.

Death is an encounter with oneself.

Clarice Lispector