Ceased To Exist Quotes & Sayings

In the fire of his embrace, all that was her ceased to exist. Only what was God remained. I am. The cloisterbell, the voice of Christ. He spoke again: I am. She tried to obey but was frozen in beauty, like a fly trapped in amber. She could not move. Nothing exists apart from me. Self had been an illusion, a dream. God dreaming. — Mark Salzman

The sound in my headphones ceased to exist, but somehow that's when I truly heard everything. — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

But the destruction of any starship was a shocking thing to witness. Resilient and ferocious as they might appear, she was keenly conscious of the fragile life-forms protected by the hulls and armaments. Those weren't just ships exploding before her eyes. They were sentient beings, each of whom had families, friends, hopes, dreams, lives, until they met with unassailable force and ceased to exist in a brilliant flash of light. — Kirsten Beyer

He had given himself over to endless wanderings, a life of migration from life-to-life, albeit not necessarily a set of migrations one must view as physical, but rather a set of migrations between circumstances, a set of migrations where the players surrounding him were just as likely to move as he, but nonetheless, a set of migrations calling forth a life unalterable only by its lack of permanence. Along with this came the slow, but dawning realization that he had relinquished his claim over those new memories he could have created alongside the friends and relatives closest to him; and that he had, furthermore, ceased to exist in such people's minds, except as a faint and indistinct silhouette of what he had once been, situated seamlessly against the vivid and oddly memorable backdrops of spaces and moments which shall never be again. — Ashim Shanker

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. — Mark Twain

But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them. — Henryk Sienkiewicz

Today, for many people, being a union member simply means paying dues, but in the early days there were so few of us that if a majority of the members were not active, the union ceased to exist. — Rose Schneiderman

I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate ... 'Whitley' ceased to exist. What was left was a body and a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death ... I died and a wild animal appeared in my place. — Whitley Strieber

As a bird swoops down on it's prey, and assumes this land bound wretch into heaven, so did romeo steal her lips before they fled him again. suspended somewhere between cherubs and devils, his quarry ceased to buck, and he spread his wings wide and let the rising wind carry them off across the sky, until even the predator himself had lost every hope of returning home. within that one embrace, [he] became aware of a feeling of certainty he had not thought possible for anyone - even the virtuous. with her in his arms, all other women, past, present, and future, simply ceased to exist. — Anne Fortier

At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still. — Angela Carter

Fife ... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny. — James Jones

There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time - we've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will. — Robert A. Heinlein

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended. — John Green

On January 3, 1992, a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down. — Samuel P. Huntington

The lonely reality of the truth-that the most important person in your life suddenly ceased to exist. Which on a bad day meant maybe she had never existed at all. And on a good day, there was the other fear. That even if you were a hundred percent sure she had been there, maybe you were the only one who cared or remembered. — Kami Garcia

Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist. — Adolf Hitler

all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal. — Arthur C. Clarke

[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured. — Diana Trilling

The Maximilian of her memory ceased to exist next to the real man. The former was a simple penny-lute tune. In the flesh, Max was the King's Theater orchestra playing Haydn. — Wendy LaCapra

Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist
for we would be no longer who we are. — Stephen R. Lawhead

The world around them ceased to exist, and they stared at each other accross the tumult, communicating thoughts that could not be put into words. His eyes never strayed from her face, as if he were trying to read every line to understand what he saw there. She held her breath, almost unable to bear the intesne rush of ecstasy she felt when his eyes were upon her. "I love you." Her lips formed the words she was too overjoyed to speak. — Jennifer Beckstrand

Nineteenth-century Russian literature, swooning with compassion for the suffering brother, had created for Nerzhin, and for everyone reading it for the first time, the image of a haloed, silvery-haired People, embodying all wisdom, moral purity, and spiritual grandeur.
But that was far away, on bookshelves; it was somewhere else, in the villages and fields at the crossroads of the nineteenth century. The heavens unfolded, the twentieth century came, and those places had long since ceased to exist under Russian skies. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

At the moment you are no longer an observing, reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist only in that quiet, steady thrill that is so unlike any excitement that you have ever known. — May Sinclair

With amazement and disappointment, we discovered in late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist. — Gunther Blumentritt

There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs - dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. — Jeffrey Eugenides

God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist. — Arthur C. Clarke

I saw clearly that something could be found there which had long since ceased to exist in Europe and I considered that the direction I had taken was the right one. But, at the same time, I — P.D. Ouspensky

Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee. — Emily Bronte

Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy they do not know how to fulfil, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic. — Andrea Nye

Only when he has ceased to need things can a man truly be his own master and so really exist. — Anwar Sadat

And now after considerable experience with the many public institutions which I have managed, it has become my firm conviction that it is not good to run public institutions on permanent funds. A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution. A public institution means an institution conducted with the approval, and from the funds, of the public. When such an institution ceases to have public support, it forfeits its right to exist. Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion, and are frequently responsible for acts contrary to it. In our country we experience this at every step. Some of the so-called religious trusts have ceased to render any accounts. — Mahatma Gandhi

Lockwood sat up awkwardly, adjusting his Bubble-Wrapped loops of chain. 'We're in good shape,' he said. 'We've lost the heavy duty chains and the stuff in the bags, but we've got our rapiers, iron, and silver seals. And we've found what we wanted now.'
I stared at the clean, calm surface of the door. 'Why couldn't it come after us? Ghosts can pass through walls.'
Lockwood shrugged. 'In some cases a Visitor is tied so completely to the room where it met its death that it no longer has any conception of there being any adjacent space at all. So ... when we left its hunting ground, it was as if we ceased to exist, as if we ceased to be ... '
I looked at him. 'You haven't really got a clue, have you?'
'No. — Jonathan Stroud

Looking back, you might say that Ambros Adelwarth the private man had ceased to exist, that nothing was left but his shell of decorum. — W.G. Sebald

What was irritating was that they sat there with their heads together as though he had ceased to exist. Neither looked around until he cleared his throat again, loud enough that he wondered whether he had strained something. — Robert Jordan

For having expressed an opinion, however far-fetched, we straightway become its slave, ready to die defending it, and even ready to believe it. And many continue to be martyrs to causes which have ceased to exist, their crowns rusting upon their heads as tin wreaths rust upon forgotten tombs. — Paul Eldridge

Do you know what I think? I think God has been dead for millions upon millions of years. I think when he took infinity and set in motion the process that has resulted in the universe, he died, and for ages and ages men have sought and worshipped a being who ceased to exist in the act of making existence possible for them. — W. Somerset Maugham

Bram stared into a pair of wide, dark eyes. Eyes that reflected a surprising glimmer of intelligence. This might be the rare female a man could reason with.
"Now, then," he said. "We can do this the easy way, or we can make things difficult."
With a soft snort, she turned her head. It was as if he'd ceased to exist.
Bram shifted his weight to his good leg, feeling the stab to his pride. He was a lieutenant colonel in the British army, and at over six feet tall, he was said to cut an imposing figure. Typically, a pointed glance from his quarter would quell the slightest hint of disobedience. He was not accustomed to being ignored.
"Listen sharp, now." He gave her ear a rough tweak and sank his voice to a low threat. "If you know what's good for you, you'll do as I say."
Though she spoke not a word, her reply was clear: You can kiss my great wolly arse.
Confounded sheep. — Tessa Dare

What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist? — Angela Carter

The most successful revolutions aren't those that are celebrated with parades and banners, drums and trumpets, cannons and fireworks. The really successful revolutions are those that occur quietly, unnoticed, uncommemorated. We don't celebrate the day the United States Constitution was destroyed; it didn't happen on a specific date, and most Americans still don't realize it happened at all. We don't say the Constitution has ceased to exist; we merely say that it's a 'living document.' But it amounts to the same thing. — Joseph Sobran

Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed. — George Orwell

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. — Rebecca Solnit

Organised brigandage has ceased to exist, but murder and highway robbery are still far too common in the less frequented districts. Travellers rarely suffer to-day, however. It is the wealthy inhabitants who run risks at the hand of the mafia, or lawless Sicilian. — Alec-Tweedie

The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. — William Golding

Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico. The art called popular is fugitive in character, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community - rather than being taken from the experiences of painters in other times and other cultures. — Manuel Alvarez Bravo

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence, I know likewise that I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel. — Giacomo Casanova

I'd never been anything but 'in transit' through my life. In a sudden, complete, instantaneous vision, I saw it as a train and myself as a passenger always changing compartments, moving on to another before getting to know the self left behind in the last carriage. I'd always presumed these old outgrown personalities has ceased to exist when I discarded them, possibly lingering on for a while as remembered ghosts of what they had been, till they finally sank into oblivion, dead and forgotten. Now, for the first time, I understood that it wasn't possible to discard any part of myself. — Anna Kavan

After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Amendment Protection Society, Inc. - the largest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet porn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States - intimidated — Dean Koontz

He pulled me to his chest, and when he kissed me, gravity ceased to exist. The sensation was like floating on air as the world erupted into chaos around us. But he was my anchor, pulling me back to earth - he was my home. — Komal Kant

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist ... literature had stopped. — Boris Pasternak

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist. — W. Somerset Maugham

The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, travelled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across that square, red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone. — William Golding

She felt some strange yearning, but she couldn't decide what it was for. Not for the city: it seemed like another country to her now, remembered, not felt. She knew if she were there, walking past the market with its glistening stacks of fruit that sometimes rolled onto the pavement, stepping into the pharmacy for overpriced shampoo and body cream, passing the windows full of nice clothes like the clothes she already has (once she got a linen blouse home only to discover that she owned one almost exactly like it), she would be convinced that she could no longer stand to be be away, that she missed it all terribly. But from here that life seemed unreal, like something she saw in a movie. She wondered if that's how her grandparents had managed to leave the old country behind, whether it had ceased to exist as a discernible thing once it was gone along the watery horizon, whether they had told themselves that some day they would come back to reclaim it. — Anna Quindlen

By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson. — Oliver Stone

Tinsley hated the thought of people greeting her with "Where's Julian?" It was like once you were a couple, you ceased to exist as an individual. It made her a little sick to her stomach. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory. — John Steinbeck

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have been difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama, "Go with the boy." The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me. — Marcel Proust

Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. — Marcel Proust

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1965 and jumped to the section entitled "Junitaki Today." Of course, the book's "today" being 1970, it was hardly today's "today." Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a "today." And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history. — Haruki Murakami

He interrupted her with a kiss, an embrace, a touch, caresses and then with everything, his whole being, his every thought, his only thought, everything, everything, everything. They broke the silence with sighs and the rustle of clothing strewn on the floor. They broke the silence very gently, lazily, and they were considerate and very thorough. They were caring and tender and, although neither quite knew what caring and tenderness were, they succeeded because they very much wanted to. And they were in no hurry whatsoever. The whole world had ceased to exist for a brief moment, but to them, it seemed like a whole eternity. — Andrzej Sapkowski

The world ceased to exist.
She was not a gunn, and he was not a MacKay. They were man and woman. Her thoughts spun. Her emotions whirled... — Victoria Roberts

National Defense A strong USA defense brought down the Soviet Union. It was Ronald Reagan - first in a speech at Notre Dame University in May 1981, then his 'Evil Empire' speech of March 1983 - who most eloquently declared communism's imminent demise. Reagan was right. And even Soviet officials attribute Ronald Reagan's rhetoric and foreign policy to bringing down that 'evil empire.' By Christmas Day, 1990, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Liberals wished it were other things. — Rush Limbaugh

People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The reason sex is fun is not to cater to the desire for individual human pleasure, but because hunanity would have ceased to exist a long time ago if it were drudgery. — Joe Beaton

You are the witness of the three bodies: the gross, the subtle, and the causal, and of the three times: past, present and future, and also this void. In the story of the tenth man, when each of them counted and thought they were only nine, each one forgetting to count himself, there is a stage when they think one is missing and do not know who it is; and that corresponds to the void. We are so accustomed to the notion that all that we see around us is permanent and that we are this body, that when all this ceases to exist we imagine and fear that we also have ceased to exist. — Ramana Maharshi

Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied. — Chris Marker

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog. — Maurice Blanchot

In his world, there was right and wrong, good and evil. Hers contained no absolutes. Hers was a world of grays. Hers was what his was truly becoming. The irony didn't escape him. At night, nothing was clear. Lines blurred. Shadows removed definitions.
Her dreams led her to the darkest parts of London where he couldn't follow and keep her safe. His dreams had ceased to exist long ago. — Lorraine Heath

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the 'evil empire' ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not. — Robert Foster Bennett

Slumped to the floor. The pit of blackness welcomed her to let go and fall into the murky depths where conscience and pain ceased to exist.
Hands to her head, face to the stone, screaming without sound, she pushed back hard.
For nine months she'd tasted happiness, a chance at the closest thing she'd known to peace and a real life. For nine months the rage and violence that had defined so many of her years had finally ebbed, and now those who had no right had come with impunity to rip her out of this newfound calm, throwing her into an impossible situation where no matter what she did or what she chose, the end result would be a return to madness. — Taylor Stevens

Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of "playing". A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which "neighborhoods" have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of "neighbor childrens" houses or play in "backyards". In the absence of sidewalks in newer "gated" coummunities, children cannot "walk" to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A "playdate" is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.
In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been awaiting. — Joyce Carol Oates

Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine. The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards to warm pellucid depths, where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving back into his emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes centered on the lagoon, each of which seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. — J.G. Ballard

St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. — Graham Greene

Though nothing much had happened, he felt that he had seen and experienced enough that day - thus securing his tomorrow. For today he required no more, no sight or conversation, and above all nothing new. Just to rest, to close his eyes and ears; just to inhale and exhale would be effort enough. He wished it was bedtime. Enough of being in the light and out of doors; he wanted to be in the dark, in the house, in his room. But he had also had enough of being alone; he felt, as time passed, that he was experiencing every variety of madness and that his head was bursting. He recalled how, years ago, when it had been his habit to taken afternoon walks on lonely bypaths, a strange uneasiness had taken possession of him, leading him to believe that he had dissolved in the air and ceased to exist. — Peter Handke

On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist. — Anthony M. Esolen

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is ... the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished. — Georg Brandes

All the ordinary circumstances of life, without which nothing could be imagined, ceased to exist for Levin. — Leo Tolstoy

The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? — David Horowitz

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all. — Margaret Atwood

Though it may be the peculiar happiness of Socrates and other geniuses of his stamp, to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for its preservation on the reasonings of the individuals that compose it. Par 1, 36 — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is often said that The Self has no location, but Wu Hsin will now reveal exactly where to look. Look where there is no difference between The known and the unknown, Where there is no difference between Self and other, Where all differences have ceased to exist. Here you will find It. — Wu Hsin

When you hear that my body has ceased to exist, please do not feel sad. Just look deeply and see that my life and work continue in so many friends, so many young people, in their own ways and through their work. I will continue in everyone and everything I have ever touched. I have nothinng to fear and nothing to regret. — Chan Khong

I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. — Gunter Grass

I wish I can meet my wife in the hereafter, but I don't think I will. I just cease to exist just as she has ceased to exist. — Lee Kuan Yew

Possibly, over the course of time, the brain capacity of homo sapiens will have made such great progress, that complications as contained in this game can be fathomed instantly with a shrug and a smile. Then, not only will the game of chess have ceased to exist, but also will the remembrance of frequently missed objectives elicit pity, as a reaction to the shortcomings of a lower organized form of life. — Lodewijk Prins

The story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening, forever. It's what's known as the heat-death of the universe. An era when the cosmos will remain vast and cold and desolate for the rest of time the arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. It's an inescapable fact of the universe written into the fundamental laws of physics, the entire cosmos will die. — Brian Cox

Time was of no consequence and I just hoped that eternity would start now. The person I used to be had suddenly ceased to exist. I was melting and being remodeled into nothing but the hand he was just holding right now. — Amira Aly

Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences. — Leo Tolstoy

If the president is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist. — Steve Stockman

She swallowed thick spurts of release with fierce hunger, her own moans rising to his ears, vibrating through his shaft. He bucked into her, thrust into her, pumped into her mouth until rhythm ceased to exist to him and his body was no longer his, but hers. Until his seed was drained of him, and her tongue washed him clean.
Until he was lost to her. Christ, he was lost to her. — Lexxie Couper

And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago - and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him. — Doris Lessing

Bound and helpless to do anything but moan, she gave in to the unraveling until she fell apart with a pleasure so intense it felt like dying, like the universe had ceased to exist because nothing could ever be this perfect again. — Nicolette Hugo

Plastic surgery is a way for people to buy themselves a few years before they have to truly confront what ageing is, which of course is not that your looks are falling apart, but that you are falling apart and some-day you will have fallen apart and ceased to exist. — Nora Ephron

And since no one any longer responds to things spontaneously-you take drugs to study, drugs to love, drugs to rise up in revolt, drugs to forget-the distinction between manipulated and natural feelings has ceased to exist. — Stanislaw Lem

Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, "Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?" would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified - when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested. — George Orwell

Most of us live in a world that has ceased to exist. — Mason Cooley

The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. — George Orwell

I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me ... If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa. — Ivan Turgenev

The USSR, which they'd begun to renovate and improve at
about the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so
much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana,
that's what must have happened in this case) — Victor Pelevin

Democracy and religion stand or fall together. Where democracy has been destroyed, religion has been doomed. Where religion has been trampled down, democracy has ceased to exist ... Tyrants have come and have had their day and then have passed while religion has survived them all. — Herbert H. Lehman

Peace at least. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I'm alone and calm. It's like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I'm no longer attracted to anything down here, I'm also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I'd ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact. — Pessoa, Fernando