Quotes about Existence
We partake of the ideal but we also make poo.
— JM Coetzee
She shakes him; that is what she presumable does to other readers too. That is, presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Pennsylvania and given money!
— JM Coetzee
Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
— Jack Kerouac
Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.
— Jack Kerouac
No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
— Jack Kerouac
Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.
— Jack Kerouac
The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that's no Harvard lie.
— Jack Kerouac
Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.
— Jack Kerouac
The little flowers grew everywhere around the rocks, and no one had asked them to grow, or me to grow.
— Jack Kerouac
For when you realized that God is Everything you know that you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is, in the ultimate sense it was neither good nor bad (consider the dust), it was just what was, that is, what we made to appear.
— Jack Kerouac
I am an appearance The world is an appearance The bread I eat is an appearance All wish't forth from Mind Essence Due to Ignorance-- I don't have to exist I don't exist, I do exist-- Who cares? For the purposes of this world Do nothing Or do everything anyhow.
— Jack Kerouac
Oh what was the racket that backeted and smashed in raging might, to make this oil-puddle world?--
— Jack Kerouac