Quotes About Existence

it is no longer possible to be both human and alive)

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

and there isn't anything I want to do about the fact that you are unhappy & sick you aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it

Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it's the universal protest against Time. Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

It's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." ... Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you've got.

In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float.

Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is

Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it's the universal protest against Time. Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. // The Year of the Flood

No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish.

What is the real breath of a man— the breathing out or the breathing in? Such was the nature of the gods

He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.

Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life.

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.