Quotes About Existence

Given the world, given the situation, the question that remains is whether having children is a statement of hope, an insistence on the beauty and meaningfulness and basic worth of being here, or an act of human sacrifice.

Our existence, and its attendant neurosis, is defined by a seemingly irresolvable contradiction: that we are outside of nature, beyond it and above it like minor deities, and yet always helplessly within it, forever defined and circumscribed by its blind and implacable authority.

Just because you never look at me doesn't mean I'm not here.

Alone, even in a crowd. Dead, but able to touch and sense the living. Real, but intangible.

If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality.

What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.

It is consciousness that brings both suffering and enjoyment to the world.

A zoologist from another universe, where we can suppose the two laws do not apply, might justifiably classify most earthly fauna as subspecies of worm. We are superstructures built on and around our alimentary canal — on and around the worm that we once were.

A hole is defined by its edges, and these are not part of the hole. So a hole can exist only if there is something that is not a hole.

Everything you do, everything you'll ever accomplish, your life's work, your kids' life's work: horseshit. (Ecclesiastes) [God Is Disappointed in You]

In the fire of his embrace, all that was her ceased to exist. Only what was God remained. I am. The cloisterbell, the voice of Christ. He spoke again: I am. She tried to obey but was frozen in beauty, like a fly trapped in amber. She could not move. Nothing exists apart from me. Self had been an illusion, a dream. God dreaming.

What if you tell a joke in the forest, and nobody laughs, was it a joke? —Steven Wright To create your comedic MAPP, you start with the purpose.

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

Even when choosing stillness we are still moving, our hearts beating, breath flowing, all our systems at work.

Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.

We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

Life should be more Than the body's weight working itself from room to room.

I myself have started to feel the onset of something, a sadness perhaps, the dawn of a new season, and existence even. But enough of this. Tell me about yourself and what it is like where you are. Do the leaves ever stop falling? Are the shadows ever anything but long? — Mark Strand, from "Two Letters," The Continuous Life: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)

Will the same day ever come back, and with it Our amazement at having been in it, or will only a dark haze Spread at the back of the mind, erasing events, one after The other, so brief they may have been lost to begin with?

by being both here and beyond I am becoming a horizon from "The Man in the Mirror

En un campo yo soy la ausencia del campo

I walk into what light there is — Mark Strand, from "Another Place," Collected Poems (Knopf Doubleday, 2014)