Quotes About Existence

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue.

You amaze me, he said. You think nothing exists if you can't see it.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe.

Nihil sub sole novum [...] Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quiet frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. I

He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life.

Understand, by saying 'God,' I am merely using 'God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher.

We have art in order not to die from the truth. — NIETZSCHE

when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling—through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life.

Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence—of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do—is catastrophe.

how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that's worth living for lies in that charm?