Quotes About Transience

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.

The world was a series of fleeting gratifications.

Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.

words stick even as lives fly apart.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Nihil sub sole novum [...] Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

How could the apartment have seemed so permanent and solid-looking when it was only a stage set, waiting to be struck and carried away by movers in uniform?

He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life.

He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.

Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters?ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit's perfect but it won't last, it's about to go. And see here especially," she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, "this passage?the butterfly." The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. "How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.

Probably I'll be dead soon.

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came.

I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is

And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever. -Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)" Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

We note feelings and find that they last for only a few seconds. We pay attention to thoughts and find that they are ephemeral, that they come and go, uninvited, like clouds.

If we learn to be aware of feelings without grasping or aversion, then they can move through us like changing weather, adn we can be free to feel them and move on like the wind.