Quotes About Existential

The meaning of life is life.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

I get panic attacks about dying, it's terrible. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and my brain goes 'you're going to die, you're going to die, you're going to die.'

I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn't find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.

Being dead is a pretty good alibi for anyone who's in trouble with the law, but in Nazi Germany it was an existential hazard.

One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.

Je n'ai pas des angoisses, je suis dans une angoisse perpétuelle.

I think it's always interesting to make sensational stories where, if these people don't make the right choice, it actually puts marks not just on their souls but also their bodies. That means that you can visualize existential questions.

The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

Living, it's awful for me.

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone's hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom?

I was playing it existential, and maybe a bit stupid, but it was the only way I knew how to play it.

I realized I was on a something island. 'How did I get here,' I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, and how can I get back?

I think after you live it's like before you lived.

In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams.

What will my redeemer be like? I wonder. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one.

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.

I am always frightened of something which exists in the majority of people, but which I cannot explain. The young generation of the period of transition were like me. In our mind we despised our slavery, but we ourselves became cowardly slaves.

Companies rebrand so often because people who work in branding know, deep down, that they don't have real jobs and the constant emphasis on logos and color schemes creates a frenzy of activity that distracts them from the creeping existential dread that haunts their every waking moment.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.