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Quotes about Existence

It is often said that the divided condition of Christendom is an evil, and so it is. But the evil consists in the existence of the errors which cause the divisions and not at all in the recognition of those errors when once they exist.
- J. Gresham Machen
We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?
- JM Coetzee
To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.
- JM Coetzee
But two and two do equal four. Unless you give some strange, special meaning to equal. You can count it off for yourself: one two three four. If two and two really equalled three then everything would collapse into chaos. We would be in another universe, with other physical laws. In the existing universe two and two equal four. It is a universal rule, independent of us, not man-made at all. Even if you and I were to cease to be, two and two would go on equalling four.
- JM Coetzee
When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.
- JM Coetzee
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