Quotes About Existence

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

It's about waking up. A child wakes up over and over again, and notices that she's living. She dreams along, loving the exuberant life of the senses, in love with beauty and power, oblivious to herself -- and then suddenly, bingo, she wakes up and feels herself alive. She notices her own awareness. And she notices that she is set down here, mysteriously, in a going world.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.

People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home.

We still & always want waking.

Am I living?'...I forgot myself, and sank into dim and watery oblivion.

You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.

This is what I had come for, just this, and nothing more. A fling of leafy motion on the cliffs, the assault of real things, living and still, with shapes and powers under the sky- this is my city, my culture, and all the world I need.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21).

That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very comprising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

beauty and grace [in nature] are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

An infant is a pucker of the earth's thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off: we forget our beginnings. A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I have finished swelling: our circling periods are playing out, but we can still leave footprints on a trail whose end we do not know. Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think you can go it alone.

Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the 'augenblick' isn't going to 'verweile'. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless.

Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.