Quotes About Transience

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

It's like watching paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

Semmi sem valódi, csak a jelen, és én máris érzem, századok súlya fojtogat. Élt egy lány száz évvel ezelÅ'tt is, mint ahogy én most. ? halott. Én vagyok a jelen, de tudom, hogy egyszer én is elt?nök. A nagy pillanat, a lángcsóva, jön és megy, véghetetlen futóhomok. Nem akarok meghalni, nem.

Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers.

I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track.

Every so often a beam of light appeared out of thin air, traversed the wall like a ghostly, exploratory finger, and slid off into nothing again.

I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water…

Van valami végleges abban, ahogyan valaki elt?nik lassan az úton, nem fordul meg, nem néz vissza. (…) Van valami végtelenül nyomorúságos, végtelenül végleges az üres útban. Csak mégy tovább, hallgatsz. (Egy júniusi nap)

I lay back in the car and let the colored lights come at me, the music from the radio, the reflection of the guy driving. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

Saturday morning, and I am at the old game of catching time between my fingers as it is running, forever running, away.

The sun will diminish it soon enough: Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.

Io sono il presente, ma so che anch'io me ne andrò. L'instante sublime, la fiamma che consuma arriva e subito scompare: sabbie mobili, semore. E io non voglio morire.

I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water—so fast that I have little time to stop running.

What am I doing with a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood, Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers? — Sylvia Plath, from Leaving Early," Crossing the Water . (Harper Perennial May 9, 1980) Originally published 1971.

Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death

We are the music while the music lasts.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.

And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time , there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.

All time is unreedemable.

Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

that which is only living Can only die

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses.

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then.