Quotes About Transience

You know some minutes warn you they're going to be mighty short and you'd better take a snapshot of 'em while you can. ("Golden Baby")

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die.

A world like a boat passing by, and perhaps another on the dark water.

I settle on nothing; I decide nothing. This is not a final place. There is no such place.

I mean, they're made out of dust. You're all just dust and dried blood, you're dead. You are not absolute.

it goes away and you almost forget it but emotions stay

it's a pitiable likeness of clear running struggling to keep up with what's already gone

and half-formed faces float out and vanish too undulating to be actual

not yet continuous no more than a shiver of something

and the hour is quickened by crows

This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one

In fact, most things that threaten to last forever often become quite annoying.

Consider that this day ne'er dawns again.

The robin brushes me at dusk. Our good bones fail. We leave no mark. His voice, she writes, was clear and quiet. I hear him singing in the dark. ("Edward Thomas' Daughter")

todos a los que cuidamos y amamos han de morir. ¿Y no es todo nuestro canto un lamento porque todo lo que es verde y bello ha de pasar, como las sombras sobre una llanura, sin dejar rastro? ¿Qué canción, por bella que sea, puede aliviar esta angustia?

I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day's end it would be over. I had never felt so good before. I was never to feel so good again.

Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.

I guess I just don't get the point. It's like, why should you bother getting attached to anything if, A: It's never gonna last, and B: It hurts like hell when it's over?

In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burned into baking asphalt.

Dès que j'ai atteint mon indépendance, un logement habité par moi a d'emblée ressemblé à un débarras squatté par des réfugiés politiques, prêts à déguerpir à la moindre descente de police.

Il est très difficile de savoir où s'arrêter. C'est encore ce problème de la frontière : l'autre passe par votre vie, il faut accepter qu'il puisse en sortir aussi facilement qu'il y est entré.

Ante el descubrimiento de este futuro expolio, sólo existen dos actitudes posibles: o bien uno decide no encariñarse con las personas y las cosas, con el fin de que la amputación no resulte tan dolorosa; o, por el contrario, uno decide amar todavía más a las personas y las cosas, poner toda la carne en el asador, «ya que no estaremos mucho tiempo juntos, te voy a dar en un año todo el amor que te habría podido dar en una vida»

Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.