Boris Pasternak Quotes

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude, but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness. 'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

Hell's waking up every goddamn day and not even knowing why you're here.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understanding, personally, that is the most important thing.

I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.

I felt my whole life was a facsimile of a life.

For a while now I've had this feeling that there's something that I'm supposed to be doing or something that I'm supposed to contribute. I don't know what that is yet, but it's been plaguing me - like I've missed my calling somehow.

I don't want to put meaning on what I do because I don't know what it is.

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

Often, warriors find their lives meaningless.

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

You do find a lot of your time in the West kind of searching for your place in the world - your voice, your identity, like, who am I? Like, what is my reason for being here, you know? And in that same way who am I to be partnered with, you know?

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples, some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must surely be some purpose that has my name written on it. If this is not so, if I am deceiving myself about this too, then why should I want to become real? What reason have I to live anywhere?

I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.