I Still Exist Quotes & Sayings

In your room where time stands still
Or moves at your will.
Will you let the morning come soon,
Or will you leave me lying here?

In your favorite darkness,
Your favorite half-light,
Your favorite consciousness,
Your favorite slave.

In your room where souls disappear
Only you exist here.
Will you lead me to your armchair,
Or leave me lying here?

Your favorite innocence,
Your favorite prize,
Your favorite smile,
Your favorite slave.

In your room your burning eyes
Cause flames to arise.
Will you let the fire die down soon,
Or will I always be here?

Your favorite passion,
Your favorite game,
Your favorite mirror,
Your favorite slave.

I'm hanging on your words,
Living on your breath,
Feeling with your skin.
Will I always be here? — Martin L. Gore

Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I knew beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid. I thought how terrible the nights must have been in a time when men knew the things were there and were deadly. But no, that's wrong. If I knew they were there, I would have weapons against them, charms, prayers, some kind of alliance with forces equally strong but on my side. Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid. — John Steinbeck

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element. — Lady Gaga

Have you ever been in a temple and seen men kneeling silently, reverently, their souls raised to the greatest height they can reach? To the height where they know they are clean, and clear, and perfect? When their spirit is the end and the reason of all things? Then have you wondered why that has to exist only in a temple? Why men can't carry it also into their lives? Why, if they can know the height, they can still want to live less than the highest? That's what we want to live, you and I. — Ayn Rand

Most people will say that this story which I told "It's not a happy"... doesn't exist, but sorry it exist. I made in normal age, like 10 or 14 years old to can be saw the drama, if it was baybe, the baybe will cry, won't it?
The age which I put the girl was the perfect, teenager in the same time, mother which is lost which will mean she has died... her father with a strange past still a mystery. — Deyth Banger

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I'm feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I'm feeling sad, it's my consolation. When I'm feeling happy, it's part of why I feel that way.
If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone. — Frederick Buechner

It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course ... I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied. — Isadora Duncan

I've been doing this with her for on day and I have no idea what's happening. I don't know if it's a full moon or if I have a tumor wrapped around my heart or if she really is a witch. Whatever it is still doesn't explain how this kind of thing can exist between two people that ridiculously fast ... and actually last. — Colleen Hoover

I smell guilt. There is a stench of guilt upon the air.
I see you all, whole and healthy, with your powers intact - such prompt appearances! - and I ask myself ... why did this band of wizards never come to the aid of their master, to whom they swore eternal loyalty? And I answer myself, they must have believed me broken, they thought I was gone. They slipped back among my enemies, and they pleaded innocence, and ignorance, and bewitchment ...
And then I ask myself, but how could they have believed I would not rise again? They, who knew the steps I took, long ago, to guard myself against mortal death? They, who had seen proofs of the immensity of my power in the times when I was mightier than any wizard living? And I answer myself, perhaps they believed a still greater power could exist, one that could vanquish even Lord Voldemort ... perhaps they now pay allegiance to another ... — J.K. Rowling

For a split second today I could smell home. It smelled like sunset on a dirt road. I thought my heart was going to break. The world I left behind was so close I could almost touch it. Everything in me cried out for it. It's amazing how certain shades of agony have their own beauty. I can't ever seem to make myself believe that the home I once knew doesn't even exist anymore. It's still too real inside my head. I wish I had a handful of dust from back then, so that I could keep it in a bottle and always have it near. — Damien Echols

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere. — Danzy Senna

By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn't give. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water. — Jonathan Lethem

I still don't understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now? — Catherine Marshall

Still. Four words.
And I didn't realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:
Dear Neil,
If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children's area, what would it be?
Thanks!
Lynn
I pondered a bit. I'd said a lot about books and kids' reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote:
I'm not sure I'd put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I'd just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I'd put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it's working, and that pages will be turned:
... and then what happened? — Neil Gaiman

He moved very quickly to her and put his arms around her. And there was hunger and eagerness in his body and in his face.
"Not angry," he said. "No, not angry. And still, angry."
He stroked her cheek.
"Angry at time when you were away. Angry at time. Irritated with the minutes when you aren't with me."
"I like that," she said. "It's good to be missed. I came back as soon as I could. It's good to be away a little. Then I know how well and strongly I love you."
He strained her tight to him.
"I get frightened," he said. "My mind plays games, it whispers that you don't exist, it sneers that you'd gone away, it whines to me that there's no Mordeen. It's a cruel and mischievous game. — John Steinbeck

I was just thoughts, just air. There was nothingness all around me. Was this what it was like to be dead? When you died, did you still sense everything going on around you, only it was happening so far away that you didn't care about it? You were floating through space and time, and nothing that happened to you mattered because nothing really could happen to you because you didn't exist? — Melissa Kantor

There was something so unreal about her, sitting there. I couldn't even see her face; couldn't discern the outline of her figure. Even then she fascinated me. That she could seem so calm, so still. She would sit in one place for hours at a time, unmoving, and I always wondered where she was in her mind, what she might be thinking, how she could possibly exist in that solitary world. More than anything else, I wanted to hear her speak.
I was desperate to hear her voice. — Tahereh Mafi

I envy you, your youth. Every woman is still a dream, a thing that can't exist. Even when you touch her, a creature too beautiful to be real or to cause real pain. It's different for old men. We have more old wounds from these dreams. — Rasmenia Massoud

But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow that there is still always the danger of gynocide. — Helene Cixous

I lied a lot when I was a kid. Somehow, I still do this today, but maybe in another way - not quite as ridiculously clumsily as I used to. But still, I think making music has a lot to do with it. One invents something that one can't possibly be. With songs, one invents a world that wouldn't exist otherwise. — Sophie Hunger

It feels as though Tony's a ghost, a wisp of someone I once loved, or never loved at all and thought was someone else. I don't feel anything, not even when he fucks me. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if he believes I still want him. I always tell myself it's the last time, but I don't leave. i exist instead inside this shell of a life we've created. — Sandy DeLuca

The light that shines through the windows of the eyes and ears - if those windows did not exist, the light would not stop. It would find other windows to shine through.
If you bring a lamp before the sun, do you say, "I see the sun by means of this lamp"? God forbid! If you did not bring the lamp, the sun would still shine. What need is there for a lamp? — Rumi

I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life...It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think...it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in SPITE of the pain. — Stephen King

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened. — Jon Snow

And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain! — Emile Zola

To this I replied, "I still think that my body is not merely a sensory appearance, for surely it came from my parents, who were its cause and condition."
He said, "If you think that your body came from your father and mother, then what are the beginning and end of these parents? What are their source, their location, their final destination? Tell me!"
I answered, "I think that they exist, but I am not aware of what they are. It seems to me that a physical body without parents is not possible."
He retorted, "Consider this. Who are the parents of the body in a dream, in the bardo, and in the hell realms?" With that, I arrived at the decision that this body has never existed, being simply a sensory experience. — Dudjom Lingpa

Let me not be understood as saying that there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed. — Abraham Lincoln

I'm not a person who stands still well. But the the earth is always in motion, and I like keeping up with it. I don't want just to exist. I want to know. I want to see. I want to understand. — C.J. Cherryh

Part of it is, I think, just to let people know you've got a record out there and that you're still alive requires more work than it used to, because the traditional radio, bug chains of record stores, all of that, that doesn't exist anymore. — Steve Earle

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all ... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead. — W.G. Sebald

When I go to business meetings, I'm still told way too often by some receptionist, 'The mail room is downstairs,' to believe that racial perceptions don't still exist. But I figure there are always going to be knuckleheads no matter how many of their herd get stuck in the tar pits of progress. — John Ridley

I want to be connecting with the subconscious, if I can call it that, because there are not to many words to describe the real deep inner part of a human beingI want to be at that place where everything is blotted out and where creativity happens, and to get there I practice, you know I'm a prolific practicer, I still practice every dayYou have to have the skills, then you want to not think when you're playing, that's when you let whatever deep level of creativity, spirituality, I mean, you know these words are so inadequate these days but you want to get to this place where they exist. — Sonny Rollins

Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy - happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love - are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify. — David Foster Wallace

Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you. — Ovid

I'm very appreciative of, and I also, having traveled the world, know that the United States is one of the few places where there really are no limitations. As long as you've got drive and hard work and a good idea and you can get out there and do your thing, there's no social classes, so in a lot of countries there's a big history of regardless of how much money you may make, there's still that little thing where you're not in society. That doesn't exist here. — Gloria Estefan

The awe of a naked female body is different, I thought, completely different. Naked girls exist almost exclusively, and for the longest time, in pictures. Movies, ads, porn. Moving or still images revealing what can only be guessed, grazed, or mentally drawn. Sleeping with a girl is bringing the uncommon, the extraordinary, into the very common: your bed, your body, your hands. Sex with a man, I realized, is initially the opposite. The very common nakedness of guys, glanced at, studiously ignored, forced upon you in locker rooms, sleepovers and showers, is thrown at you in the most uncommon, the most extraordinary setting: a forbidden and overpowering sexual disorientation. When you first sleep with a girl, you get the affirming feeling you've arrived. When you first sleep with a guy, you are drunk with displacement. — Benjamin Ashton

Your life better. I know my faith makes my life better, and whether what I believe in exists or not, because I have faith in it, I get the benefits of that faith. I'm not going to ever have faith in God or anything like God. Do you have faith in love? Meaning what? Do you believe in love? Yeah. Do you believe it can make your life better? Yeah. Do you have faith in anything else? Friendship. You believe in friendship? Very much so. Anything else? What's your point? You can't prove love or friendship exist, but you still have faith in them. I'm asking — James Frey

To exist in this poem [of creation] is a greater gift than any finite creature can imagine. To be so insignificant and yet still be given a speaking part, to be given scenes that are my own, and my own only, scenes where the audience is limited to the Author Himself (scenes that I often flub), to have been here with my frozen nose, to have been crafted with at least as much care as a snowflake (though I'm harder to melt), and to hear and feel and see and taste and smell the heavy poetry of God, that is enough. — N.D. Wilson

Not the first time. I didn't think my heart could stand it. But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here." He touched his heart. "It isn't there." And he pointed at the dusty road. I — V.S. Naipaul

Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible. — Jean Baptiste Perrin

Does a human life, a "personality," exist as a single thread that can be followed through time? Is the "me" of 20 years ago the same "me" that exists now? Will I still be me in 20 years? — Dan Chaon

I am more lost from the world than anyone has ever been.
More lost than people who lived here before here had a name.
Those people understood stars.
The still felt north in their bodies.
I don't have any idea what happened to north.
My life so far has made me stupid, helpless, dependent.
I am not like the people who came before.
They knew how to feed themselves, how to give birth by squatting in the roots of a tree.
They were lost, but lost didn't matter back then, since there was no found.
They could wander these woods before tribes, before people even.
Following deer or bears or who knows what.
The sort of lost that doesn't exist anymore anywhere. — Samantha Hunt

How could there be a stone unturned in the quest to understand your life's purpose? So many well entrenched systems already exist and some have done so for thousands of years. Still we are all inquisitive creatures by nature and I aim to feed your voracious appetite and stoke the ever-burning fires of controversy by introducing you to Life Cycles."

After all you cannot be a quiet revolutionary. — Neil Killion

Do you still think Mianaai controls the Radchaai through brainwashing or threats of execution? Those are there, they exist, yes, but most Radchaai, like people most places I have been, do what they're supposed to because they believe it's the right thing to do. No one likes killing people."
Strigan made a sardonic noise "No one?"
"Not many," I amended. "Not enough to fill the Radch's warships". — Ann Leckie

Yeah, Vi, unless Armageddon hit while i was fuckin' you this morning and we missed it, I'm thinkin' grocery stores still exist and they're all still stocked. — Kristen Ashley

I cannot prove that gods do not exist. Nor can I prove that the world and everything in it was not created by an entity or entities in the distant past. But I can tell you that in the millennia we elves have studied nature, we have never witnessed an instance where the rules that govern the world have been broken. That is, we have never seen a miracle. Many events have defied our ability to explain, but we are convinced that we failed because we are still woefully ignorant about the universe and not because a deity altered the workings of nature. — Christopher Paolini

She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I amwithout adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world. — Sharon Maas

The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. — Kurt Vonnegut

A girl's career today doesn't have the same kind of life span, whereas it used to be a collaboration and a partnership and it continued. Peter Lindbergh still uses girls - like, look at Amber Valetta - so there are some photographers that have relationships long-term with models. I also think that the industry can't support the amount of models that exist right now and therefore the relationships between photographers and models and even the clients is short lived. — Michael Flutie

If a tree falls in the woods when no one is there, does it still make a noise? If a girl dies in the woods when no one is there, does anyone care? If no one knows I am here, do I even exist? — Lisa Jahn-Clough

Are you okay, Maggie?" Logan asked, rousing me out of my mind-numbing speculations.
Heaving a big sigh, I turned to him and said, "I guess so."
"Are you still worried about visiting your mother?" he asked softly.
Nodding, I said, "A little. I'm just so confused about this whole time-space-brain twister thing. And I'm afraid I might say the wrong thing and mess everything up." I shook my head, trying to make sense of my thoughts. "I mean - what if my younger self should call my mother while I'm there visiting her? Is there really another version of me? Or by coming here from the future, did the younger me cease to exist? — Sharon Ricklin Jones

I've noticed that the people who started on film still have the ability to see the person in front of them. Whereas for a lot of photographers who have only ever worked in digital, the relationship between the photographer and the person who they're taking a picture of sort of doesn't exist anymore. They're looking at a computer screen as opposed to the person. — Keira Knightley

In my family nudity just doesn't exist; I'm pretty sure my parents were both born fully clothed and still shower that way. — Huston Piner

One thing I try to do with my work is to show that people who have extreme fetishes or who exist outside the constraints of "normal" society still have romantic impulses and are capable of love and tenderness. Sometimes people cannot or don't want to acknowledge that pornographers are people too! — Bruce LaBruce

I think language is a system that we have devised to negotiate a series of more amorphous entities. It's a layer you can use to see where those things exist, but if you don't have anyone speaking anymore, those things are still there. The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans. — Blake Butler

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds. — David Almond

I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy. — Alan Dershowitz

Home is where I am. Sadly, I don't need a history to be able to exist somewhere. When I was still very young, my father told me: 'Look, we will always have to move, again and again.' I thought that was marvelous! That's how I got used to thinking that life meant starting from scratch, over and over again. — Sophie Hunger

Women often postpone their lives, thinking that if they're not with a partner then it doesn't really count. They're still searching for their prince, in a way. And as much as we don't discuss that, because it's too embarrassing and too sad, I think it really does exist. — Jane Campion

you cannot leave
and have me too
i cannot exist in
two places at once

-when you ask if we can still be friends — Rupi Kaur

I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my throat, it caresses me- and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me. — Jean-Paul Sartre

If love were enough, I'd tell St Peter to close his gates; I'd block out the stars, and cover the moon with a fist. I'd find a place where time stands still, where no world would exist, except one where we could stand together arm in arm. Except, my darling, here's the secret you should know: where you are, so am I. No there exists or here. No place exists where I would not come when you need me, for you will always exist in a place where my love is without end. — Lily Graham

And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can't see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they're always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is truly lost, I think. — Cristina Henriquez

I still can't believe that people can exist and then not exist, from one second to the next. And when they're gone, all they are is an accumulation of things. They're reduced to whatever possessions they leave behind. — Anna Jarzab

The conference brochure asked: "How do we come to tolerate the ambiguity inherent in not-knowing or, more confusing still, sort-of-knowing?" I guess I would say it has to do, SORT-OF, with the wiring of the brain; SORT-OF with how much our caretakers were able to affirm the rights of all parts of us to exist; and SORT-OF being lucky to have someone to talk to at the right times - including someone who can think about you as a silkworm when you most need it. — Jean Petrucelli

Never did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much as in the journeys I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am still; my body must be in motion to move my mind. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. — Claude Levi-Strauss

What you see is what you see, but that is never everything. Sarajavo is Sarajevo whatever you see or don't see. America is America. The past and future exist without you. And what you don't know about me is still my life. What I don't know about you is still your life. Nothing at all depends on you seeing it or not seeing it. I mean, who are you? You don't have to see or know everything. — Aleksandar Hemon

From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a
container already built for us to fit inside: A social security number, a gender, a race, a profession or an I.Q. I ponder if we are more defined by the container we are in, rather than
what we are inside. Would we recognize ourselves if we could expand beyond our bodies? Would we still be able to exist if we were authentically un-contained? — Paige Bradley

She should want to see me. If I had said how I feel about her, she would miss me even more. All this time, I've been breaking her heart by keeping her wait, yet I can't still appear before her eyes. I never want to see her cry anymore. Even if it means I no longer exist in her heart. How immature of me, right? -Kudou Shinichi — Gosho Aoyama

That kind of woman who used to be there at the time is not here any longer. In 10 years, people disappear. But I fantasize still about those kinds of women, and that kind of life that doesn't really exist any longer. — Manolo Blahnik

Heart: Because you're hurt. Because even though I'm broken, I still exist. — Delia Foster

A man of few words,
I just sit still on this hill,
I know death will persist,
I write when my mind is still,
I bleed daily to exist. — P.J. Bayliss

Words ruin one's thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one's memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words (are) bringing everything down. Depression derives from words, nothing else. — Thomas Bernhard

America, my love, you are sunlight falling through trees. You are laughter that breaks through sadness. You are the breeze on a too-war day. You are clarity in the midst of confusion.
You are not the world, but you are everything that makes the world good. Without you, my life would still exist, but that's all it would manage to do.
You said that to get things right one of us would have to take a leap of faith. I think I've discovered the canyon that must be leaped, and I hope to find you waiting for me on the other side.
I love you, America.
Yours forever,
Maxon — Kiera Cass

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision. — W.G. Sebald

You are infinitely my superior in merit; all that I know - You have qualities which I had not supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you, beyond what - not merely beyond what one sees, because one never sees any thing like it - but beyond what one fancies might be. But still I am not frightened. It is not by equality of merit that you can be won. That is out of the question. It is he who sees and worships your merit the strongest, who loves you most devotedly, that has the best right to a return. (326) — Jane Austen

These feelings of rage and distress and despair that you talk about," I said, circling something I knew I would have trouble articulating. "They only exist because of your original love for your father. They are like signposts back to that love. His leaving took that love with him, or appeared to, but you will see, if you stay with your meditation, that all of that love is still there in you. From the infant's perspective, it's directed at only one or two people, but even if they failed you, that capacity for love is still there in you. It's too bad for your father that he didn't get to know it - but there are plenty of people now who will be grateful for it. There's a whole roomful right here. — Mark Epstein

Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that's the way we're planning it. — Alice Hoffman

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive? — Amy Reed

Farmers everywhere provide bread for all humanity, but it is Christ alone who is the bread of life ... Even if all the physical hunger of the world were satisfied, even if everyone who is hungry were fed by his or her own labor or by the generosity of others, the deepest hunger of man would still exist ... Therefore, I say, Come, all of you, to Christ. He is the bread of life. Come to Christ and you will never be hungry again ... — Pope John Paul II

Takes one to know one. What kind of guy makes a girl an amazing cake without expecting something in return?"
"A guy who doesn't exist!" Renee yells from the couch, her mouth still full of cake. I hoped she didn't choke. — Chelsea M. Cameron

When we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? — G.K. Chesterton

How can you tell there's anything out there?" said the man politely. "The door's closed."
"But you know there's a whole Universe out there!" cried Zarniwoop. "You can't dodge your responsibilities by saying they don't exist!"
The ruler of the Universe thought for a long while while Zarniwoop quivered with anger.
"You're very sure of your facts," he said at last. "I couldn't trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe - if there is one - for granted."
Zarniwoop still quivered, but was silent.
"I only decide about my Universe," continued the man quietly. "My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay."
"But don't you believe in anything?"
The man shrugged and picked up his cat.
"I don't understand what you mean," he said. — Douglas Adams

He's dreaming, Cloquet thought, as he stood over him, revolver in hand. He's dreaming, and I exist in reality. Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak. — Woody Allen

I'm now unemployed. It's a weird feeling with no work, but at least there's still golf. Standup comedy is like my core, it's what I do. But I want to be a pro golfer. It's a love/hate relationship with golf. I can come away feeling so serene, and yet, it's the thing that I can let get to me to throw a club and say curses that don't even exist. I'm obsessed with something that won't let me master it. I don't know. I need therapy. — Ray Romano

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them. — Elif Batuman

My original goal in the '90s, after I found feminism and I was the first generation in my family to go to college, was to spread this information that feminism was still very much alive, and that you can't believe the media telling you that it doesn't need to exist and that it doesn't exist. — Kathleen Hanna

I can't go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I'm with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems. Take just the opening paragraph. If, having read that, we decide the book isn't worth our time, then the book ceases to exist in any meaningful fashion. Someone else may cause it to live again another day in another reading, but for now, dead as Jacob Marley. Did you have any idea you held so much power? — Thomas C. Foster

I was created, then the Society ordered the destruction of all mods. The day after I was born, the date of my death was set! So I sweated in that pill, just waiting to die. Day after day, my brothers and sisters were killed. Then I got lucky and got shipped out with a load of goods by mistake. Still, I always expected to be discovered and destroyed. I had a lot of time to think about things. I decided no one has the right to take a life. I exist! I should have the right to live and die freely!! Like humans, or even bugs. Even a mod should have that right. So I refuse to take a life. I won't kill ... not anything! — Tite Kubo

Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?"
"It is if you first become a part of nature. You suppress your presence as a human being, stay very still, and convince yourself that you are a tree or grass or a flower. It takes time, but once the butterfly lets its guard down, you can become friends quite naturally."
...
" ... I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear. I'm sure it means they've died, but I can never find their bodies. They don't leave any trace behind. It's like they've been absorbed by the air. They're dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world. — Haruki Murakami

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? — Don DeLillo

I am confident that life once thrived on Mars and may well still exist there today. — Craig Venter

O how all things are far removed
and long have passed away.
I do believe the star,
whose light my face reflects,
is dead and has been so
for many thousand years.
I had a vision of a passing boat
and heard some voices saying disquieting things.
I heard a clock strike in some distant house ...
but in which house? ...
I long to quiet my anxious heart
and stand beneath the sky's immensity.
I long to pray ...
And one of all the stars
must still exist.
I do believe that I would know
which one alone
endured,
and which like a white city stands
at the ray's end shining in the heavens. — Rainer Maria Rilke

A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence that maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty. — Immanuel Kant

Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant ... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous ... I don't think this helps us to survive ... We're very species-centric ... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth. — W.S. Merwin

I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around ... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that. — Charles Soule

And if you were still here today, I would tell you, that in your future, do not settle for anything less than the Jake Andrews of the world. Because they exist, and not just in fairytales. — Jay McLean

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever. — Lauren Oliver