Quotes About Transience

The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

The beauty of things must be that they end.

The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me

But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do

And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

We are nothing. - Tomorrow we may be die. We are nothing. - You and me.

A feeling of sadness that only bus stations have.

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words ? We will pass just as quietly through life (passing through, passing through) as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that wont even last a million years ? The world being just what it is, moving and passing through, actually alright in the long view and nothing to complain about.

In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age.

I realize I'm just a silly stranger goofing with other strangers for no reason far away from anything that ever mattered to me what that was--Always an ephemeral visitor to the Coast nevery really involved with anyone's lives there because I'm always ready to fly back across the country but not to any life of my own on the other end either, just a traveling stranger like Old Bull Balloon... (p. 178)

And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my even hearing him.

This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what everything is.

Sal, straight, no matter where I live, my trunk's always sticking out from under the bed, I'm ready to leave or get thrown out. I've decided to leave everything out of my hands. You've seen me try and break my ass to make it and you know that it doesn't matter and we know time — how to slow it up and walk and dig and just old-fashioned spade kicks, what other kicks are there? We know.

I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.

The floors of bus stations are the same all over the country, always covered with butts and spit and they give a feeling of sadness that only bus stations have.

Poor [Jack Kerouac], his day is so sorrowful and worried, his reasons are so ephemeral, it's such a haunted and pitiful thing to have to live.

O sweetheart and okay Here's hopin we'll all be away It was great fun But it was just one a those tings

In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; Part 4, Chapter 5

Que sensação é essa, quando você está se afastando das pessoas e elas retrocedem na planície até você ver o espectro delas se dissolvendo? – é o vasto mundo nos engolindo, e é o adeus.

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.

Occasionally bums passed, Mexican mothers passed with children, and the prowl car came by and the cop got out to leak, but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.

Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon,' wrote Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, 'then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.