#existent

Afternoon experience: autographing exposed legs, outstretched in lines like matchsticks. Afternoon epiphany: Those with smooth, hairless legs would soon lose all evidence of my contact when the sweat causes the ink from the marker to run. I am ephemeral. Skepticism would be the reaction to those with thick leg hair, as their curls frazzle the lines of my name outward illegibly. Among the scaly-legged, I flaked off immediately, like I never was at all. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#epiphany #existentialism #funny-and-random #legs #experience

My love life doesn't stink; it's nonexistent. ↗

— Kevin Eubanks

#love #love life #nonexistent #stink

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #death

Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance. ↗

— Stephen A. Diamond

#existentialism #anger

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#hippies #new-age #sandwiches #age

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened. ↗

— Archie Shepp

#culture #decade #existential #how #idea

I'd like to ask you more about your ears if I may," I said. "You want to ask whether or not my ears possess some special power?" I nodded. "See what I mean?" She said. She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light. "You are extraordinary." I said after catching my breath. "I know." she said. "These are my ears in their unblocked state." Several of the other customers were now turned our way, staring agape at her. The waiter who came over with more coffee couldn't pour properly. Not a soul uttered a word, only the reels on the tape deck kept slowly spinning. She retrieved a clove cigarette from her purse and put it to her lips. I hurriedly offered her a light with my lighter. "I want to sleep with you," She said. So we slept together. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#look-with-thine-ears #beauty

A Christian is supposed to be in the world, and yet not of the world--a Both/And as perplexing and demanding as the Either/Or that precedes the life of faith. I'm at once a pure, beautiful, genderless soul, but at the same time a gendered body full of flaws, sins, and wanting. This contradiction, the Both/And, is the Cross. ↗

— Therese Doucet

#existentialism #faith #kierkegaard #philosophy #philosophy-of-religion

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought. ↗

— David Eagleman

#death #existentialism #human-nature #life #love

Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing. ↗

— Dag Hammarskjöld

#war #death