Quotes About Transience

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.

Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.

It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

and that's you gone, but it was good while it lasted.

Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.

Where body meets air, we are all cadavers.

Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, "Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust

Just like that, they were gone and the patio was mellow again. As Rich said later, it was like a "gust of wind." MJ was the gust; everyone else was the twigs, leaves, and branches flying around.

If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?

This is where dad burried the little raccoon. I don't even know he existed a few days ago and now he's gone forever. It's like I found him for no reason. I had to say good-bye as soon as I said hello. Still...in a sad, awful, terrible way, I'm happy I met him. What a stupid world.

152] Between us and heaven or hell there is only life half-way, the most fragile thing in the world.

Notre durée vaine et chétive

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

i been meek, and hard like an oak, i seen pretty people disappear like smoke. friends will arrive, friends will disappear. if you want me, honey baby, i'll be here.

Don't get up gentlemen. I'm only passing through!

La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió, después de una imperiosa agonía que no se rebajó un solo instante ni al sentimentalismo ni al miedo, noté que las carteleras de fierro de la Plaza Constitución habían renovado no sé qué aviso de cigarrillos rubios; el hecho me dolió, pues comprendí que el incesante y vasto universo ya se apartaba de ella y que ese cambio era el primero de una serie infinita.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

For life, too, is only an instant, Only the dissolving of ourselves In the selves of all others As if bestowing a gift –

When they jumped down on the tracks, stretched their limbs, picked flowers, and took a little run, they all had the feeling that the place had just emerged only thanks to the stop, and that the swampy meadow with its knolls, the wide river, with a beautiful house and a church on the high bank opposite, would not be there had it not been for the accident that had taken place.

Evil arrives faster than it departs.

Drácula) Qué pocos días son necesarios para que pase un siglo.

The box is only temporary.