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Quotes About Existence

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, Ive 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.
~ Donna Tartt
Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming
~ Donna Tartt
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game.
~ Donna Tartt
For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.
~ Donna Tartt
It was better never to have been born - never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
~ Donna Tartt
And what is beauty? Terror. And if beauty is terror, then what is desire? To live. To live forever.
~ Donna Tartt
A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.
~ Donna Tartt
achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day;
~ Donna Tartt
Nihil sub sole novum
~ Donna Tartt
so the space where I exist, and 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.
~ Donna Tartt
And—maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest
~ Donna Tartt
It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
~ Donna Tartt
Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: 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?
~ Donna Tartt
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 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. And
~ Donna Tartt
that fire of pure being
~ Donna Tartt
I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
~ Donna Tartt
I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.
~ Donna Tartt
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. And—I would argue as well—all love.
~ Donna Tartt
When God speaks, when the Word speaks, energy is translated into matter. What is atomic fission? It is matter translated back into energy—poof! it disappears. Creation began with energy. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God.
~ J. Vernon McGee
Dogs live in the moment. They don't think. They don't dwell on the future. They exist to meet their base needs. Eating. Sleeping. Breeding. Surviving. No worries. No regrets. Minimize effort, maximize pleasure.
~ J.A. Konrath
Satan's greatest feat is to convince us he doesn't exist. He doesn't want us to believe in him, and that makes it easier for him to spread his evil. Lucifer is the Master of Lies.
~ J.A. Konrath
I once held my existence dear With every breath a welcome chore But now my days are spent in fear Of when my days will be no more
~ J.A. Konrath
Extinction wipes out, point by point, the clues to the code of existence; extirpation is the great, sucking retreat of the tide of life.
~ Unknown
Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.
~ Unknown