#existential

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#build-up #chronology #development #existentialism #family

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith ↗

— Ernest Becker

#god #religion #death

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small. ↗

— Paul Bowles

#humanity #life #life

Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise. ↗

— Henry Miller

#love

Seeing the moving handmill, Kabir wept and said, "Alas, no one has survived the pressure of the two millstones (of the heavens and the earth). They left all their mighty empire and pomp and show behind them and but for a handful of dust no trace remains of their existence. Nobody knows about them or about what happened to them after their death -- what insects ate them up and how they fared with God. Thus alone shall one realize that this world is a transitory place and man has nothing to gain from it; it is a puppet show. Thus alone shall one find peace. ↗

— Mir Amman

#death

wop-bop-a-lu-bop... a-lop-bam-boom! ↗

— R.W. Penniman

#existentialism #inspirational #little-richard #inspirational

Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards.' In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to 'fly upwards ↗

— Andrei Tarkovsky

#existentialism #inspirational #suffering #inspirational

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #philosophers #men

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all? ↗

— Betty Friedan

#feminism #housekeeping #inspirational #marriage #parenting

Me parece que de nada vale correr si siempre ha de irse por el mismo camino, cerrado, de nuestra personalidad. Unos seres nacen para vivir, otros para trabajar, y otros para mirar la vida. Yo tenia un pequeño y ruin papel de espectadora. Imposible salirme de él. Imposible libertarme. Una tremenda congoje fue para mí lo único real en aquellos momentos. ↗

— Carmen Laforet

#coming-of-age #existentialism #laforet #nada #spanish-civil-war