Quotes About Existence

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.

I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time.

The young woman thought: "You've got to be old or mad. But we stayed too young. Is it any fault of ours? We still soak up the juices like a sapling. We rob nature just to exist. Oh and by the way, the earth still has a molten middle, and its chimneys sometimes spew forth and bury places blossoming with life. Isn't that so? Bane of my existence, fire of my soul, Edgar, my beloved, you keep me young, don't let me grow old!

I know I am God because when I pray to him I find I'm talking to myself.

What was it? What could it-- His last thought was surprise.

There is a difference between seeing the world and being in it, which is one point that alludes most people.

Reality' is a word with many meanings.

A large part of our excessive, unnecessary manifestations come from a terror that if we are not somehow signaling all the time that we exist, we will in fact no longer be there

Because if one starts from the premise that a stage is a stage -not a convenient place for the unfolding of a staged novel or a staged poem or a staged lecture or a staged story- then the word that is spoken on this stage exists, or fails to exist, only in relation to the tensions it creates on that stage within the given stage circumstances.

I am specialising in the Universe and all that surrounds it

Heaven is only my next moment here. from "Nethering," Pleiades (vol. 34, no. 2, Summer 2014)

Thus it has always been: Only in death do worthless people have worth.

We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is 'good' or 'matters' or has 'meaning,' a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced - something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks.

Indeed, the more void the universe may be of meaning, the more precious the lanterns by which man picks his little way through it.

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us,

La búsqueda de sentido está condenada al fracaso de antemano porque la vida no tiene "sentido", pero eso no significa que no valga la pena vivirla.

no era tanto su lógica aplastante como su fe frustrada: no podía perdonarle a Dios que no existiera.

Everything becomes rubbish in the end. We sometimes wonder if people weren't invented as an extra-quick way of making rubbish.

Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.

I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through their experience, when and where they existed.

And all this talk of dying and being crucified and hidden doesn't describe a one-time moment of conversion when we "become Christians," as if that's final. If things were only that easy—a one-time transaction of "accepting Jesus" and then it's over. Dying describes a mode of existence we agree to once we enter the holy space of being a follower of Jesus—surrendering control, dying, all the time.

Life alone is precious, but conscious thought is the greatest gift the universe offers.