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f6fc8a1
|
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
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existential
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James Baldwin |
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c9b47c6
|
She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.' 'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
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happiness
love
existential
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
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f0a5975
|
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
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|
motivational
life-lessons
existential
|
Franz Kafka |
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744201b
|
He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.
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i-am-legend
existential
post-apocalyptic
plague
sci-fi
|
Richard Matheson |
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7e5c854
|
The universe is a meat grinder and we're just pork in designer shoes, keeping busy so we can pretend we're not all headed for the sausage factory. Maybe I've been hallucinating this whole time and there is no Heaven and Hell. Instead of having to choose between God and the devil, maybe our only real choice comes down to link or patty?
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existential
|
Richard Kadrey |
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b2e44dd
|
All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.
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|
people
existential
americans
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
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79e4f3e
|
Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral.
|
|
sadness
existential
melancholy
funeral
sartre
existentialism
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Jean-Paul Sartre |
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48eaa4b
|
He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.
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|
fate
existential
luck
|
Hunter S. Thompson |
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f776010
|
I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.
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|
existential
race
|
Ralph Ellison |
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443c150
|
What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short. But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it's the common lot, even I was not immune, if that may be called an erection. It did not escape her naturally, women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away and wonder, How on earth did he spot me from there? One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably. What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.
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|
first-love-last-love
existential
|
Samuel Beckett |
|
402c1c0
|
Oh, Karamazov, I am deeply unhappy.
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|
kolya
existential
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
|
f1684c6
|
Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --
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|
truancy
existential
|
Tom Stoppard |
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ffb33b4
|
"I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don't want to be "just another patient". I wanted to be "special". I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn't forget. I'd exist then. (Marge's letter to Yalom)"
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|
existential
remembrance
self-esteem
psychology
|
Irvin D. Yalom |