Quotes About Transience

Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

Thus we are driven, lost souls, from camp-fire flame to camp-fire flame, know nothing of our next rest and nothing of the journey's aim

You came and you will be gone. You don't even have to do something for it, it happens by itself. You came by itself and you will be gone by itself. So, what do you worry about?

One day beside some flowers near his noseHe will be thinking, When will I look at it?And pain, still in the middle distance, will replyAt what? and he will know it's gone,O where! and begin to tremble and cry.He will begin to cry as a child criesWhose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

And shall I clutch at dear departing things While leaf and tree in silent splendor part? Go, little joys! and welcome, fluttering wings That brush my clinging sorrows from my heart!

Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.

there is no good in knowing people when you are going right away from them in a short time, and may never meet them again.

I have seen so many lands vanish in my wake, torn down like stage sets. What survives of them? An image as fleeting as a dream: whatever beauties I discovered, I already knew by heart.

The flesh was falling from the bones of those I loved, and all the mountain flowers were crushed and broken.

We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.

At a certain age—in Sadie's case, thirty-four—there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.

You are dying. No, that came out wrong. What you meant to express was the existential grief that comes with the knowledge that all things die. You are not dying, except insofar as you have always been dying.

These days won't last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it's hard to convince oneself of that.

Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.

How quickly a year passes, like a mouthful of food snatched from the maw of eternity.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

And the bell jangled, the driver started. The bus whirled off, to the last stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.

How long is a man's life, finally? Is it a thousand days, or only one? One week, or a few centuries? How long does a man's death last? And what do we mean when we say, 'gone forever'?

Lord, help me to know How fleeting my time on earth is. Help me to know how limited is my life

I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.

For the time spent in impersonal accommodation has become so brief that the contemporary nomad no longer has the luxury of settling down once and for all. Of greater importance to him is what he can take away with him, what is mobile and portable.

The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate.

We are one sour breath of night and day, then dirt and stars, but we're holding the new morning.