#existential

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#existentialism #immune-system #soap-operas #death

And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder! ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #age

But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you can’t ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death. We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don’t live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. ↗

— Henry Miller

#fight #soldier #death

Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #experience

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

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

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning. ↗

— Susan Moody

#life

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment... ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#existentialist #nausea #men