Quotes About Transience

Then, in far less time than it takes to tell - - The blip is gone - - But the wonderment begins - -

Il tempo è un grande fiume. Tutto quello che possiamo vedere di lui è un po' d'acqua raccolta nelle nostre mani. Anche se quell'acqua a volte è torbida, sappi che il grande fiume scorre limpido, prima e dopo di noi.

When my self is no longer the all-consuming preoccupation it once was, when I see it as one narrative thread among myriad others, when I understand it to be as contingent and transient as anything else, then the barrier that separates "me" from "not me" begins to crumble. The conviction of being a closed cell of self is not only delusive but anesthetic. It numbs me to the suffering of the world.

Life is a groundless ground: no sooner does it appear, than it disappears, only to renew itself, then immediately break up and vanish again. It pours forth endlessly, like the river of Heraclitus into which one cannot step twice. If you try to grasp it, it slips away between your fingers.

death was a termination, an end of existence, and those who had gone were as meaningless as evaporated dew, their very identities lost after a generation.

A flower of light pointlessly beautiful.

Las cosas cambian. Y los amigos se van. Y la vida no se detiene para nadie.

After a few minutes, it was time for me to leave. I don't know who decides these things. It just happens.

Five minutes of a lifetime

I like the word "only" in the last sentence: "…you are only a troubled guest / on the dark earth." The "only" suggests that to be a troubled guest is a normal condition, and that you might have many other identities at the same time. But to be only a troubled guest is of course a particularly sad identity.

The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death.

If days be good, they shall pass, which is a lowering thought. If they be bad, they shall pass, which is cheering.

The land claims what you leave behind.

Each moment, the world washes its hands of you, starts all over again. Easy as that. Wonderful as that.

Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn't it?

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless ending.

Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.

Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust...

Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that?

Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.

He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.