Quotes About Existence

The part of me that's me is gone. I'm just part of this line of people. There's no me left. I'm nothing.

I thought: This is what the living do. And I swooned at the ordinary nature of the task and myself, at my chapped hands and square palms, at the way my wrists bent and fingers flexed inside this living body.

This is the meaning of philosophy, insofar as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves.

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself.

Time is the fire in which we burn.

What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...) Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.) Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then? No more? No more?

Comment s'étaient-ils rencontrés ? Par hasard, comme tout le monde. Comment s'appelaient-ils ? Que vous importe ? D'où venaient-ils ? Du lieu le plus prochain. Où allaient-ils ? Est-ce que l'on sait où l'on va ?

What does one say to somebody who says: 'Whatever the sum total of the elements I am composed of I am still one entity. Now one cause has only one effect. I have always been one single cause and I have therefore only ever had one effect to produce. My existence in time is therefore nothing more than a series of necessary effects'?

But how do you know that the whole world hasn't its meninges, or that there isn't a big or little spider living in some corner of space with threads extending everywhere?

Comment s'étaient-ils rencontrés? Par hasard, comme tout le monde. Comment s'appelaient-ils? Que vous importe? D'où venaient-ils? Du lieu le plus prochain. Où allaient-ils? Est-ce que l'on sait où l'on va? Que disaient-ils? Le maître ne disait rien; et Jacques disait que son capitaine disait que tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut.

That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?

This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you--we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination.

WE'RE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF REALITY ITSELF. RIGHT WHERE IT TURNS INTO A DREAM

Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be...

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body, lonesome behind the face that is certainly not the face of the person one meant to become.

What I don't think has been talked about is the fact that in order to be Hell, the people in Hell could never be sure they were really there.

He didn't know what country he was in, but he was at home in the universe.

She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog's tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.

You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.

he'd revised his thinking as to reincarnation and now believed the concept to be solely metaphorical, "just another word game, even if the saints and Buddhas are playing it," and who was I to argue about things like reincarnation? My own treatment of the matter went no farther than to pray it was a fiction, this single current addled existence of mine being vastly more than enough.

He thought he might as well. There's really only one question. What's that? Did God really kill Himself? Leanna wasn't smiling now. She was staring at him, but softly. Who are you? she asked him. Whatever she meant by the question, he didn't want to answer it. He wiped his face with his napkin, and in reference to the warmth of the place said, Man.