Quotes About Ephemeral

In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence.

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

Our life is short, and our days run, As fast away as does the sun

I'll never say it another time, to anyone, and I ask you to remember it: In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone. -from The Dragon Reborn. By Loial, son of Arent son of Halan, the Fourth Age.

We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image—thinking of all past people lined up in orderly columns behind those living—'row upon row rise the phantoms behind us'. Actually, looking over our shoulder, we would see only around 15 rows.

take a moment to appreciate it, because tomorrow it will only be a memory.

there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.

There are little books we read as if we're eating something delicious. We quickly forget them. After a certain amount of time, perhaps we recall them again. They're Like people we're capable of loving because they're not difficult.

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance.

Why the loft? Why only there, and only then? Now Ã¢â'¬â€œ today Ã¢â'¬â€œ I think it was because I was happy. I didn't think that then. I couldn't have. I didn't know I was happy and I didn't know that happiness was finite.

I? I am nothing, replied the other. A leaf caught in a whirlpool, perhaps. A feather in the wind...

Things pass, but the essence remains. You sit, therefore, in the midst of a dream.

I grasped after the ghost of a memory. It vanished.

The waves move outward from Amber and this, too, may pass away-and me along with it.

I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance...

I never know the loved being's voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear; a tenuous yet monumental voice, since it is one of those objects which exist only once they have disappeared

For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. —JAMES 4:14

Life," Joe said. "What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it's over. Like it never happened at all.

You can be gone tomorrow.

13. Mañana habrá desaparecido (Gone Tomorrow)