#existential

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? .......could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? .....Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities… ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#freedom

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#philosophy #death

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality. ↗

— Rabih Alameddine

#art

Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#existentialism #hell #solitude #humor

He had stylized himself--life was easier that way. He had chosen a physical mould just as writer chooses a technical form. ↗

— Graham Greene

#life

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere. ↗

— Robin Sloan

#life

Everything is true, and nothing is true! ↗

— Albert Camus

#life

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #meaning-of-life #nihilism #the-absurd #life

I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless journey. It was the tension between these two poles--a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other--that kept me going. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#fear #life

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#existentialism #life