Quotes About Transience

Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.

That wind! ...it called to mind the small, scarce, stemmy flowers that she and Edmund would walk half a day to pick, though in another day they would all be wilted. Sometimes Edmund would carry buckets and a trowel, and lift them earth and all, and bring them home to plant, and they would die. They were rare things, and grew out of ants' nests and bear dung and the flesh of perished animals.

Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes.

things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay.

Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.

A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.     Once

Oh, I am a limited man, and old, and he will still be his inexplicable mortal self when I am dust.

Porque, en su intensa vida yo debía de ser una de las pocas cosas estables, el idiota fiel y enamorado, siempre allí, esperando la llamada para hacer sentir al ama que era todavía lo que sin duda ya estaba dejando de ser, lo que pronto no sería más: joven, bella, amada, codiciable.

Dan camkan ini, pada hari di mana kalian berhenti berjalan, kalian akan lenyap seutuhnya.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold onto for very long, and the ones who don't understand you at all stick around.

Life hangs from so slender a thread. Life is but a sigh..

La vie ne tient qu'à si peu de chose, la vie n'est qu'un soupir ...

Here and gone. That's what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.

Both the steamboat service to Albany and the Erie Canal were destined to be swiftly fleeting marvels, eclipsed by the next idea. Only seven years after the Seneca Chief brought whitefish to New York Harbor, the city's railroad age had begun. The

The Polyphemus moth never made it to the past; it crawls in that crowded, pellucid pool at the lip of the great waterfall. It is as present as this blue desk and brazen lamp, as this blackened window before me.

When a person arrives in the world as a baby, says one Midrash, "his hands are clenched as though to say, 'Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.' When he departs from the world, his hands are open, as though to say, 'I have acquired nothing from the world.

nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.

Moreland used to say love was like sea-sickness. For a time everything round you heaved about and you felt you were going to die – then you staggered down the gangway to dry land, and a minute or two later could hardly remember what you had suffered, why you had been feeling so ghastly.

The cigar has been smoked out, and we are the ashes.