Quotes About Being

I hear the thundering flood tumbling my life from world to world and form to form, scattering my being in an endless spray of gifts, in sorrowings and songs..

Only those of tranquil minds, and none else, can attain abiding joy, by realising within their souls the Being who manifests one essence in a multiplicity of forms.

Come and rejoice, for April is awake. Fling yourselves into the flood of being, bursting the bondage of the past. April is awake. Life's shoreless sea is heaving in the sun before you. All the losses are lost, and death is drowned in its waves. Plunge into the deep without fear, with the gladness of April in your heart.

I have often looked at photographs of writers in their elegant book-lined studies and marvelled at what seems to me a mirage of sorts, the near-perfect alignment of seeming with being, the convincing illusion of mental processes on public display, as though writing a book were not the work of someone capable of all the shame and deviousness and cold-heartedness in the world.

You are not waiting for your life to start. It's going on right now.

I like being in movies that have a great story. I'm not so interested in being a Hollywood star. It's a job, you know. When you wake up at six in the morning every day for a week, it feels like hard work.

Well, we all are what we are, I guess you might say by an accident of birth.

I want people to realize that they aren't their bodies. They are something more than their bodies.

I don't know whether it is a boon or a bane but I can't act. I can just be. To me, that's the beauty of a performance. Otherwise, there is a falsetto, which sounds jarring.

At times I think and at times I am.

As people, no matter what we are doing, your whole body is living and breathing.

My only success is that I am alive.

Suddenly, you are very much in the present, and you learn it's really the place where you should always live.

I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

Your sole contribution to the sum of things is yourself.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things. Things will not abandon you. The nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands. Everything in the world of Things and animals is filled with being, of which you are part.

She was in herself, like a woman near term, and did not think of the man, going on ahead, or the path, climbing upwards towards life. She was in herself. And her being-dead filled her with abundance. As a fruit with sweetness and darkness, so she was full with her vast death.

Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being . . . . It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisibly, inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

Truly being here is glorious.

We are the driven ones. But the march of time Is but a trifle In our perpetual enduring. All this hastening Will soon be done; For only lingering Can consecrate our being. Young men, don't throw Your energies into tests of Speed or aerial flight. Know that all is in repose: The darkness, the brilliantly luminous, The flower, the book