Estelle Parsons Quotes

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

It's so nice to see that one's opinion of humanity is accurately gauged.

As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.

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

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

A movie that's about other horror movies isn't interesting. A movie about who we are, is.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes anothers.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets. And if we remove the mystery of life, then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live, and how perhaps we're not as special as we always think we are.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

What interests me about life most is people, and the why of the world. That's what theatre looks at: it examines life, and gives it a cohesiveness that life doesn't have.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace.

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.