Quotes About Transience

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

Behind the glass, underneath the cellophane, remains your final summer – sweet And meaningless, and not to come again.

Old and ruined, all rotted and broken upThese plum trees function gorgeouslyA few days every yearIn a way nobody else does.

They shall arrive in a murmur And shall disappear into fog and earth

The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show.

Il susino è sfiorito. Chioma verde di foglioline giovani. Nessuno adesso potrebbe sospettare la bellezza mozzafiato di prima. Così per tante donne vecchie che per pochi giorni soltanto sono state belle.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.

Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.

This road No one on it As autumn ends —BASHO, near Kyoto, weeks before his death

Vorrebbe non tornare mai più dal suo viaggio, perdersi su un binario morto e scomparire senza lasciarsi dietro nessuna traccia.

Lì, accatastati, coperti da un cellophane appannato, ci sono i resti dell'estate: un tavolino pieghevole, qualche sedia bianca, vasi di fiori ormai secchi

Mignonne, allons voir si la rose Qui ce matin avait declose Sa robe de pourpre au soleil, A point perdu cetter verpree, Les plis de sa robe pourpree, Et son teint au votre pareil

Being a model, you know, it's a short-lived vocation.

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

I believe that everything has a shelf life.

The sun can't shine forever.

I was playing in other rock bands. Any of those bands didn't last long.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

Touching soap bubbles is another lovely metaphor.

For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it's gone.

He'd successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm's length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he'd slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz's life as well.

Her house was the heavy (but not indefinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by.

There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild-they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scatterd in the wind-but this only made him more determined to hold onto what little of her he still had.