Quotes About Transience

It was easy to leave Karoi. Karoi had always felt like a train station platform, a flat place from which we hoped to leave at any moment for somewhere more interesting and picturesque.

Medicine asked something extraordinary of nurses: to forge intimate connections with another person for hours, weeks, or months, to care thoroughly and holistically—and then to let that individual suddenly go, often never to be heard from again.

What tender threads do life and death hang

How quick, brutal, and fragile is life. You are born, you live a few years in wild hope, then you are dragged back into the night. You might have breathed on a little longer, had you not dared think yourself a human creature instead of an engine of muscle and bone.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

For him there were the hours of day to pass, but they would trickle through his hands as quietly, as simply as sand. The sun and the day would pass; there would come night. And the night would flame with a radiance surpassing the sun.

Live while you can live, then die and be done with it.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

All things move in time as they move in a dream; Abrupt, symbolic, like mountains seen through a rift, They tower and vanish. from The Jacaranda by Douglas Stewart

If we could live for a million years, then maybe it would be worthwhile to create some problems. But our life is short. Now you see, we are guests here on this planet, visitors who have come for a short time, so we need to use our days wisely, to make our world a little better for everyone.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

We try so hard to put our mark on things, we like to tell ourselves that what we do has import or will last. But the truth is, we're all just passing through. So little survives us. And when we're gone, it's simply the memory of others that keeps our time here alive. And when they're gone... That's why - when I go - I'm asking that my dust gets tossed on the water. Because ends up floating away.

But when you are engulfed in loss, how can you detach yourself in the transience of everything? How can I take a theoretically long view of things when every waking moment without Johannes is agony?

Men are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.

Flowers whisper "Beauty!" to the world, even as they fade, wilt, fall.

Live like a star, that always and mesmerize others by its beauty but doesn't anyone by its illuminance and becomes a meteoroid itself...

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

Life is a stranger's sojourn, a night at an inn.

The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

Life is death in slow motion.

This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.