Quotes About Ephemeral

The water had got into the seams and joints of the world and washed away the glue. Lives and little universes broke their banks, mingling and bubbling over and flowing out to join the river. Plastic tricycles with peeling sticker eyes, photograph albums, Bic pens, dish brushes, barrettes, uprooted tomato plants. Comics spun giddily, socks sulked against windowsills.

Magic can be found in stolen moments.

Our days on earth are as a shadow. 1 CHRONICLES 29:15

To appear for a little time and then vanish away, is the outward biography of all men, a circle of smoke that breaks, a bubble on the stream that bursts, a spark put out by a breath.

Às vezes acho que seria bom ser um fogo de artifício já explodido: seria um alívio.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent crystallization and sees time fixed to a point...

Our lives are brief, they are like strings of illusions that die, like little bubbles in our entrails. We don't even know what game it's playing at with us, but we have nothing else. It's the only thing that's more or less certain on this earth.

In every moment of conscious happiness there mingles an undertone of sadness. However full of enjoyment the present, the future is always uncertain, and it is the feeling of this--the feeling that we are of the class of ephemera--perpetually recurring in the rarest and sweetest moments of existence, that constitutes, more than any other, the "one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin."

She'd observed this before: how -- ironically -- it took death to make one feel momentarily alive, truly present, minute to minute.

We move to the dance floor. We face each other. She puts one hand on my shoulder and the other hand in mine. We start to dance. At some point Ema moves closer. She rests her head on my shoulder. I barely move. I barely breath. I just want this moment to last.

Exteriors, you learn, are temporal and illusionary and thus meaningless.

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn't it?

Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all. We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.

Like flowers scattered in a storm, a man's life is a long farewell.

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.

Reality spills through her slim fingers like the sands of an hourglass. Thus time is by no means on her side