Existentialist Literature Quotes & Sayings

I didn't choose you, but I sure as fuck can't free myself of you. — Katy Evans

A Gossip is a dung beetle in disguise .... — M. Jackson

Signing a treaty is a declaration by a state that it intends to be bound by the treaty. — Jack Donnelly

Give and Take
The Chief takes less than he is given
And gives more than he has taken — Idries Shah

Existentialist literature provides a more satisfactory account of the persistence of feminine narcissism. Simone de Beauvoir makes use of the existentialist conception of 'situation' in order to account for the persistence of narcissism in the feminine personality. A woman's situation, i.e., those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as the instrument of her transcendence, but as 'an object destined for another.'

Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised. — Sandra Lee Bartky

Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything and which makes it possible to share everything. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides. — Adam Nicolson

When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants. — Cheryl Strayed

Man's wretched state, That floures so fresh at morne, and fades at evening late. — Edmund Spenser

Of Beginnings and the Names of Things S — Patrick Rothfuss

I just like being able to spend time with my family. — Paula Creamer

Maybe I should just throw myself in the canyon. Oprah isn't on TV anymore, I saw the last Harry Potter movie. What is there to live for?' I tried really hard to think of something helpful.
'We still haven't seen the last Twilight film?'
'I read the book. They all die.'
'Really?'
'No. Dumbass. — Lindsey Kelk

Oh, the things I haven't seen and the things I haven't known,
What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown,
And yanked both ways by my mother and my father,
With a "Which would you better?" and a "Which would you rather?"

With him for a sire and her for a dam,
What should I be but just what I am? — Edna St. Vincent Millay