Quotes About Transience

APRIL 26 PEOPLE WHO FIGHT with other human beings out of anger, hatred and strong emotion, even if they gain victory over their enemies in battle, are not in reality true heroes. What they are doing is slaying corpses, because human beings, being transient, will die. Whether or not these enemies die in the battle is another question, but they will die at some point. So, in reality, they are slaying those already destined to die. The true hero is the one who gains victory over hatred and anger.

The primroses were over.

beetle-spirited vaporing

If you bind too strongly to things and people, when they disappear, it will not go maybe even a part of ourselves?

Are you telling me that even though it's changing every second, the sky is always a perfect sky?

We don't bring anything into the world and we sure as shit don't take anything out.

I mean to express the quality of a memory, in order to say something about this life we live, so much of which is fugitive, so much of which is lost in the living of it.

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there… I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then…

The next time you feel low, for whatever reason, remind yourself, "This too shall pass." It will.

He waited for death as a traveller for a bus.

death poem of Hyakka

Days and months are travellers of eternity. So too the years that pass by

Nothing endures. Don't you see, Bonox? That's what Kipling meant. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.

Todos somos partes de la tierra; algunos estamos destinados a ser grandes afluentes y a guiar las aguas por el terreno, alimentándolo y haciéndolo crecer. Algunos somos montañas que vigilan las fronteras de las naciones, protegiendo a las personas inocentes de los planes de los invasores. Y algunos de nosotros no somos más que flores, con un breve lapso para crecer a la luz del sol antes de morir.

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me.

about the blood; it isn't yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you'll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don't worry about wounds; check your functionality.

When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye.

We're all alive the day before we die.

For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever- including the jug- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.