Quotes About Transience

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees.

A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here.

The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.

I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And sometimes you'd see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams.

We could go from bliss and harmony to anger and recriminations as fast and with as little warning as a tropical storm. What made it bearable, what made it good, was that the foul weather would pass with equal suddenness, usually leaving something glorious in its wake.

mono no aware, the sadness of being human

The months and days are the travelers of eternity. —Bash?

I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that's the way things are. Things end. That's mono no aware.

mono no aware

I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life's deep, coursing threads…Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear.

This autumn- why am I growing old? bird disappearing among clouds.

The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that looks always the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.

Friends come in and out of your life like waiters in a restaurant.

I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I'd had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

remember that what will die in a year's time is not our essential being but our ability to interact physically with those we love and cherish. You

Mortal lives are not stones. They are not seas. For impermanence to judge itself by the standards of permanence is folly. Or it is arrogance. Life merely is what it is, neither more nor less. To deem it less because it is not more is to heed the counsels of the Despiser.

That beauty and truth should pass utterly

What's life in this nation? Collect emptiness in a household of cornflakes. Transient fuel gobbles attention, the television aches, the truth walks. Scheme worms welcome your corpse, trap clicks and you're in heaven, bored rigid

Buddhist writings (including this book) can be likened to a raft. A raft is a very handy thing to carry you across the water, from one shore to another. But once you've reached the other shore, you no longer need the raft. Indeed, if you wish to continue your journey beyond the shore, you must leave the raft behind. Our problem is that we tend to fall in love with the raft.

W]e long for something permanent … Yet … experience provides nothing but change.

There is only … eternal arising and ceasing – but … no thing that comes or goes.

All we ever find is the arising and ceasing of the world as it has come to be now. When you snap your fingers, it's already gone. All that persists is thus. Thus is not an object of mind but Mind Itself.

It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.