Quotes About Transience

I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.

The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn't it?

The song is over. But the melody lingers on.

Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.

I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night, the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. You can't fight it.

Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That's how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.

Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all. We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.

Like flowers scattered in a storm, a man's life is a long farewell.

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.

Only the dead stay 17 forever.

Like flowers scattered in a storm, man's life is one long farewell

On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them. -from Pinball, 1973

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.

It's like watching some rare exotic butterfly. Pleasant to watch, but you can't touch it, for as soon as you do, it dies, it's brilliance gone.

Things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all.

There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.