Quotes About Existence

Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

Who could believe that in such overwhelming beauty exists such fragility?

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. —Milan Kundera   T

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination

Some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start." (P54)

I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

He found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.

The logic against them could not be more elementary. First, the unborn entity is an actual being, it is alive. If this were not so, there would be no need for an abortion. The very purpose of the abortion is to kill that which is alive. Second, this being is human. What else could it be? Feline? Canine? Bovine? As Congressman Henry Hyde once quipped, "No woman has ever given birth to a Golden Retriever." Human beings give birth to human beings.

Prove to me that you are not a figment of my imagination. Am I a computer simulation? Does the door swing both ways? How can something come from nothing? How do you know a line is straight? If animals wanted to be eaten, would it be okay? If time stopped then stared again, would we know about it? What happens when you get scared half to death twice? What is creationism? What is ethical?

Reality is not necessarily my friend—then again, neither are dreams—but this moment, this reality, is beautiful.

I imagine that anyone who goes through trauma like I have wonders the same things I do: how God can exist and allow such awful things to happen. There are no reasons for my parents' death, and that's that.

Here's the truth. We want to read too much into life because it's convenient. Or fun. But there's no imaginary, invisible man in the sky who makes things happen.

I happen to have a certain fondness for existing--soda wouldn't have that lovely fizzy feeling if you were dead. Think of all the things you would miss: Cartoons, music, movies, video games, music, art, fingernail growth, sex...well, perhaps not sex, depending on how weird your mortician is.

Dear Die-ary, I've been to heaven and hell...and I still don't know if there is a god or a devil. Still...it's something to write about.

human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.

How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime—a million? Two million?

Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.

Everything is there

He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.

But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace at all.

But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day.

Like Udayan, Bela is nowhere. Her name in the search engine leads to nothing... It doesn't mean anything, necessarily. Only that Bela doesn't exist in the dimension where Gauri might learn something about her. Only that she refuses Gauri that access.