Quotes About Transience

Like Venice, Italy, this is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.

As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.

To be in a body is to hear the heartbeat of death at every moment.

Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.

what happens to most of these people anyway? They have their fling and then they vanish. They have to take jobs eventually as telephone operators, bartenders, partners in a lamp shop in some little town in the San Fernando mountains… and others take their places… but mostly they just vanish, and you forget about them unless you hear, one day, a certain song.

I lived on couches for something like six months. I had no home. I was totally broke. I would stay at a friend's house for two weeks, then move because I didn't want to become this permanent mooch.

I've been on a show before where I was on a billboard and then, after like three or four weeks, they took the billboard down and replaced it with nothing. Took my face down and put a white board up.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.

I think the best thing about a bubble is that it pops and is gone. That is what makes it so precious.

When something happens, I always check myself and know it's going to go away. So be prepared for it. This is a tough business for actors who are sensitive. If you try to hold on to things, you'll go crazy.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

With a play, you do it and it's gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on.

I'm often dating people, but I don't say it because you sort of know it won't last long.

We've never been anti-permanence. We just belief deletion should be the default.

Ephemeral should be the default.

There's certainly nothing lasting and definite about the theater.

Critical lice are like body lice, which desert corpses to seek the living.

I live in a bus and go from place to place and sometimes feel very detached from what's going on.

You never really own a diamond. You just get to keep it for a while before it begins a new journey with someone else.

Fighting lives and dies; you can't fight forever.

Girls and guys are like a bus stop - they come and go. You never know, like, who's going to be the right one, and what I've been taught is you really gotta figure out who you are first before you can really give yourself to someone else.

We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave this world.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.