D. J. MacHale Quotes

In Korean, the word 'future' is made up of two parts. The first part means 'not,' and the second means 'to come.' In that sense, 'future' means something that will not come. This is to say the future is now, and our now is us living our future.

The living moment is everything.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.

Overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now.

The moment is the sole reality.

Is there a thinker apart from thought?

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

Now is all we have. Everything that has ever happened to you, and anything that is ever going to happen to you, is just a thought.

I had to philosophize. Otherwise, I could not live in this world.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

That's the way it is: life inculdes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

If the future and the past really exist, where are they?

Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate...Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.

There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.

Who am I, why am I here? Forget the question, someone give me another beer.

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life.

Others of us are lost. We're forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don't recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread.

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

Life always is now, but the form the now takes changes continuously. Most people equate the form the now takes with the now itself, and so they believe there are many different moments.

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.