Quotes About Existence

She will prolong her life by the length of her story, even though time will wear on inexorably as she tells it, thus depriving her of the chance to have a new experience.

was stört, ist die Zeit, die seit ihrer Geburt schon vergangen ist ! Besonders hier, wo es hell ist... Doch das Licht der Liebe ... ist auf sie gefallen, hat sie als ein im Fallen schon aufgeplatztes Sackerl Abfall auf den Boden geworfen.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

A story is a life that didn't happen, and a life is a story that didn't get told.

Have you heard that terrifying expression "to kill time"? It's time that kills us, but we pretend it's the other way around!

People are only the phantoms of their memories.

That way the story is put on the same footing as life, because a story is a life that didn't happen, and a life is a story that didn't get told.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time- the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that THAT was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn't name didn't exist.

How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things? If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. On the other hand, why couldn't Rumi have said that?

There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi?, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.

The existentialists said you couldn't make decisions based on preexisting norms or codes, which were always too general for any given case. Rather, every decision you made created you. The decision (existence) comes first, and creates essence.

Why did I insist on blocking myself against the marrow of life? Wasn't this—this, being outside, here, negotiating with a handsome, possibly disabled mugger—wasn't this, the cigarette butts and melon guts in the gutter, the faint smell of horses, the sickening pulse of bass from the clubs—wasn't this what life was?

I went on to the balcony, lit a cigarette, and looked at the museum, wondering whether it would still be there in a thousand years. When would it not be there anymore?

For a moment it felt like we weren't in the Danube at all but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in another sense we were all here at once.

Nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment

This Life is More than Just a read through.

To imagine the world without gods and religion is reasonable enough; to imagine mankind without them is an entirely different matter.

Atheism is having the weight of doubt lifted, just to be replaced with the weight of mortality.