Quotes About Existence

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

There is a world inside the world.

The truth of the world is exhausting.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real.

The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

You and I. We're here. So might as well.

What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it?

the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

Isn't death a blessing? Doesn't it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?