Michael Leunig Quotes

He's seeing my soul, my fears, my fragility, my inability to deal with a world which i pretend to master, but about which I know nothing

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

Life is a frail moth flying Caught in the web of the years that pass.

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

You have a bout with death, things that touch your mortality, when that happens, all that bling-bling gets thrown away because all you've got is you and God.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

I was obsessed with not knowing what happened after you were dead. And I sat or kneeled for a whole day with my head against the wall, trying to figure it out. But I couldn't, and I just said, 'Okay.' And then it was nothingness.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die

It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.

Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.

As the dead rise to live, the live sink to die, the currents are deep and raging inside.

No one survives life.

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

One life is an absurdly small allowance.

So we go, so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news, "Mr. So-and-so is dead, Miss Such-a-one is married, such a ship has sailed," and lo, on our right hand or on our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently - gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this - God help us! - is what we call living!

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul.