Quotes About Existential

We are all insects," he said to Miss Ephreikian. "Groping toward something terrible or divine. Do you not agree?

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely.

But death is not freedom. For a moment, it can look like freedom. But then it's death. Anything. Something. Nothing.

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time

DFW: Well, when you're meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things, you're in—I'm in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down—there's a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel kind of all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that's … that's what I'll have when I'm alone.

Yes, I am talking about boat trailers, but also I am dying.

La vida carecía de sentido y saberlo me atosigaba como a cualquier vecino de un callejón sin salida.

When existential depression attacks without warning, your father dyes his hair.

Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.

When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines—I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?

It was the meanest moment of eternity.

I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.

Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself turned into an enormous symbol.

The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.

Our view of history . . . is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential conditions of the various social formations individually investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them.2

I was not popular in school, and I was definitely not a ladies' man. And I had a very painful adolescence, because it was all very strange to me. It wasn't like I got beat up, but the humiliation and isolation, and the existential 'God, I exist, and nobody cares' of being a teenager were extremely pronounced for me.

Being gay, you're kind of forced to ask, I suppose, very existential questions from a very, very early age. Your identity becomes so important to you because you're trying to understand it, and, I think, from the age of, like, 9, you're being forced to ask questions... that other kids maybe don't have to ask.

Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.

I love the idea of a very simple 8-bit video game character struggling with the complex question: 'isn't there more to life than the role I've been assigned?'

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

Je n'ai envie de rien, je ne sais pas quoi faire, je ne veux pas dormir, je ne veux pas rester éveillée. Je n'ai pas faim. Je ne veux pas être seule, je ne veux voir personne. J'ai l'impression d'être en sursis. Je suis juste complètement défoncée. La vérité se fait jour avec lenteur et me laisse vide... A... même A... ce que je m'en fiche.

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.