Quotes About Existence

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?

Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.

It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence.

Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One

I am concerned with gloomier matters: the condition of being flesh, susceptible to pain, infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death. My life stains the air around me. I am a tea bag left too long in the cup, and my steepings grow darker and bitterer.

The world is a force, not a presence.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.

It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Aún no habías nacido cuando los árboles eran cristal ni has nacido ahora, en esta vigilia dentro de un sueño.

The subject matter. . . is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.