Quotes About Existence

Life shouldn't be easy to lose. It's everything we have. The only thing we have, really--then gone so fast.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

Hell--or Heaven--is here, now, inside.

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It's a certainty.

I have always thought of a myth as something that never was, but is always happening

We are all blind thinking that life consists of possessing material goods, holding onto this, then that, getting to know one thing, then another, then trying desperately to ignore the fact that the whole process inevitably amounts to absolutely nothing. Life isn't a game where you have to possess and know as many things as possible. Rather, it is about reducing yourself to zero, living in a new and more authentic way.

Even if the law still existed, there wasn't going to be anyone around to enforce it.

Don't you think it would be interesting if you really could read the story of your life - written perfectly and truthfully by an omniscient author? ... how many could suppress their curiosity sufficiently to escape from reading it, even at the price of having to live without hope and without surprise?

The world is nothing without life, and all that lives takes nourishment.

I did not then know that the world is often plainer than people imagine and that the truth, no matter how banal, is always alive and glowing.

L'argent est du songe pur. Le contempler, c'est faire défiler devant soi l'interminable procession des choses de ce monde.

Nous sommes humains parce que nous avons accès à ce qui n'existe pas. Cette richesse n'est pas donnée à tous, mais ceux qui cheminent jusqu'à ce continent invisible en reviennent chargés de trésors qu'ils font partager à tous les autres.

He considered each and every second as if he'd never encountered one before, as if the time it kept was a permanent surprise.

even if the previous millisecond is closer to us than the birth of the universe, it is equally out of reach.

Pain was the only sign to her that she was alive and could feel emotion.

I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.

In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there'll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it.

The main thing is you and I should exist, and that we should be you and I. Apart from that let everything go as it likes. The best order of things to my way thinking, is the one I was meant to be part of, and to hell with the most perfect of worlds if I am not in it. I would rather exist, even as an impudent argufier, than not exist at all.

Then the air the sparrow breathed we could breathe tool

Luca feels unmoored from the boundaries of time that have always existed.

Lydia thanks the girls, and her spoken gratitude feels entirely insufficient, because what she really needs to say is that the food, yes, but also their kindness, their humanity, their very existence, has nourished some withered, essential part of herself.

defined not so much by what she's made of, but more by the shapes of what's missing

The unsolved-crime rate in Mexico is well north of 90 percent. The costumed existence of la policía provides the necessary counterillusion to the fact of the cartel's actual impunity. Lydia knows this. Everyone knows this. She