Quotes About Transience

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.

Creation is good, but it is not God. It is beautiful, but its beauty is at present transient. It is in pain, but that pain is taken into the very heart of God and becomes part of the pain of new birth.

With all its many risks, this life endures No more than windblown bubbles in a stream. How marvelous to breathe in and out again, To fall asleep and then awake refreshed.

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence. It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

To enjoy the now. It'll be gone soon enough, and no one knows what the next hour, much less tomorrow, will bring.

enjoy the now. It'll be gone soon enough, and no one knows what the next hour, much less tomorrow, will bring." Elena decided she should

How fragile our lives are anyway. How quickly things can change forever.

It was like being part of a wave of water," she says. "A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

We who live in Hendon now like to imagine ourselves elsewhere. We carry our homeland on our backs, unpacking it where we find ourselves., never too thoroughly nor too well, for we will have to pack it up again one day. Hendon does not exist; it is only where we are, which is the least of all ways to describe us.

And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon.

It comes, I suppose," I said thoughtfully, speaking to the air, "of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don't always stay where you put them.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Life is funny like that; just about the time you're able to fully appreciate the accommodations, you're checking out of the hotel.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.

My heart was breaking on my way home that day. I was crying ugly tears because I could feel it yet again...the feeling of something fading away. Fading away into 'memories.' And even if I don't forget the loneliness and sorrow that tore me apart...the memories themselves are fading, too. No matter how much I try to hold on...no matter how many times I swear it to myself...time moves on, and they begin to fade. It's cruel.

A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Every blade will wither and fade, As the old man dies again. Seasons pass, We're clinging to grass, 'Cause we've lost the sky again.

Forgive an old man. I say this here because pretty soon you get to a place where you're not sure there'll be a tomorrow, where you think I better say this now, here, because not only is time no longer on your side, you realise that it never was, that things were passing by faster than you could appreciate, and whole marvels, the quickening green of springtime, the shapeless shaped songs of unseen birds, the rising and falling of white waves, were passing without you noticing.

It is a dolorous fact that a meal, months in the dreaming, weeks in the planning and days in the preparation, is eaten in minutes.

there's something undoing about the dying light of mid-afternoon.

Que la vida no es más que una quimera; Una ilusión, un sueño sin orillas, Una pequeña nube pasajera. Vamos