Quotes About Transience

There is a river of creation, and time is a violent stream. As soon as one thing comes into sight, it is swept past and another is carried down: it too will be taken on its way.

Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse

All things fade and quickly turn to myth: quickly too utter oblivion drowns them. And I am talking of those who shone with some wonderful brilliance: the rest, once they have breathed their last, are immediately 'beyond sigh, beyond knowledge'. But what in any case is everlasting memory? Utter emptiness.

Everything by which people set so much store in life is emptiness, putrefaction, pettiness; little dogs nipping at one another; little children who laugh as they fight, and then suddenly burst into tears.

Prvo - stvari ne mogu dirnuti um: one su izvanjske i nepomi?ne; strepnja može pote?i samo iz unutarnje prosudbe. Drugo, da se sve ono što vidiš mijenja još u trenutku dok to promatraš, i zatim nestaje. Neprekidno se podsje?aj da si se i ti, kakva si sebe vidio, ve? promojenio Univerzum je mijena - život je prosudba.

They are soon gone, and we fly away. . . . So teach us to count our days / that we may gain a wise heart" (90.12).

She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

I'm fine, said Pilar, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.

Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It's the stress, it's the adrenalin, it's a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?

They blink and reality shivers.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.

You will flicker in these words and in the words of others for a while and then go out. Even if I send them, you will never get these letters. Even if I see you again, I will never see you again.

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand. He

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

and when we spoke / we spoke / the sounds of our voices fell / into the air single and / solid and rounded and really / there / and then dulled, and then like sounds / gone, a fistful of gathered / pebbles there was no point / in taking home, dropped on a beachful / of other coloured pebbles

They put the picture in the window when they have something, take it away when they don't. Sign language.

She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.

I long for periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythyms of transience as if into bed.

there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it.

Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

Mary watched the sunset from her carriage window, realizing that such beauty could never last. Life was a golden glory that faded in the wink of an eye. Life was a village fair that only lasted for a single day. As the carriage rattled along, rocking her like a babe in arms, Mary felt very old and wise. She found that she didn't mind being taken back to the castle, to a caring captivity that was filled with comforts and kindness. And she also found that she couldn't keep her eyes open.