Quotes About Transience

In the sunlight, snow melts, crystals evaporate into a steam, into nothing. In the firelight, vapors dance and vanish. In the core of a volcano, fragile things burst and disappear. The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine. What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind. The tiller seat was empty.

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, Does it really belong to me? Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

You who walk the earth know only the moment, which is whisked away with your next exhalation.

They are so confident that they will run on for ever. But they won't run on. They don't now that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that someday it'll have to it. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.

I think the sun is a flower. That blooms for just one hour.

The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.

I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, 'There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,' the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.

I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man's life,—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage. . .

His hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.

She left a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, and two vanishing trails of foam on the water.

and youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts-all dies...No matter.

Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity. The nights descended on her like a benediction.

he knew very well we were all mortal

When we see deeply that all that is subject to arising is also subject to cessation, that whatever arises will also pass away, the mind becomes disenchanted. Becoming disenchanted, one becomes dispassionate. And through dispassion, the mind is liberated.

together and disappear when the conditions change. None of them

Whatever is born will die; Whatever is joined will come apart; Whatever is gathered will disperse; Whatever is high will fall. Having considered this, I resolve not to be attached To these lush meadows, Even now, in the full glory of my display, Even as my petals unfold in splendor . . . You too, while strong and fit, Should abandon your clinging. . . . Seek the pure field of freedom, The great serenity.3

Whatever has the nature to arise will also pass away.

When we see something pleasant, we want to hold on, not understanding the impermanence of it all. As soon as we become mindful, paying attention to what's happening, seeing how everything is arising and passing away, the grasping and greed decreases. There's nothing to hold onto. It's all bubbles. And the experience of impermanence, the dissolving of the solidity of everything, brings about the letting go, the state of non-attachment.

Look at all the things we become attached to, whether they are people or possessions or feelings or conditions of the body. Nothing we have, no one in our lives, no state of mind is exempt from change. Nothing at all can prevent the universal process of birth, growth, decay, and death.

Nothing in this transitory world lasts eternally; however, the Truths of God last forever.

Everything is so fragile. There's so much conflict, so much pain...you keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on. If happy comes along--that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy--I think you have to grab it while you can. You take what you can get, 'cause it's here, and then...gone.

We get frantic in our loving. The distance between Santa Fe and Albuquerque shifts and changes. It is moments; it is years. I am next to you in skin and blood and then I am not. I tremble and grasp at the edges of myself; I let go into you.