Existence Quotes (page 115)
-
-
-
Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.
Neil Gaiman
There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings, and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.
Simone Weil
There are things around us and about, of which I can render no distinct account--Things material and spiritual; heaviness in the atmosphere; a sense of suffocation, anxiety, and above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant.
Edgar Allan Poe
I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: "I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'"And even a third way: "It doesn't present as pain," I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.
Joan Didion
When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.
Jane Smiley
For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table,
how much difference in everyday life would that make? Granted, this is a pretty
farfetched example; you can't rearrange facts of life so freely. Still, picturing the planet
earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the
clutter—those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international
dateline and the equator, those nagging details that...
Haruki Murakami
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
Graham Greene