Quotes About Transience

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.

I wanted to speak with someone, but found no time; sought some fixed point, but found none. In the midst of the unrelenting forward thrust I felt the wish to stand still. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running, as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself.

This is freedom,' said the instructress, 'it's something very wintry, and cannot be borne for long. One must always keep moving, as we are doing here, one must dance in freedom. It is cold and beautiful. Never fall in love with it. That would only make you sad afterwards, for one can only be in the realm of freedom for a moment, no longer. Look how the wonderful track we are floating on is slowly melting away. Now you can watch freedom dying, if you open your eyes…

impermanence.

What's fundamental to the Buddha's teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

Demasiado bonito para que durara, ya saben, los espíritus singulares no soportan tanto amor, tanta perfección encontrada por casualidad

Se puede conquistar a una muchacha con un poema, pero no se la puede retener con un poema. Vaya, ni siquiera con un movimiento poético.

Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void.

brevedad de la vida, en lo insondable que resulta el destino de los hombres, en la futilidad de los empeños mundanos.

in other words near the settlement of El Obelisco, which was neither a village nor exactly a suburb of Santa Teresa, but a way station for the poorest of the poor who came each day from the south, people who slept there at night and even died in hovels that they didn't think of as homes but as one more stop along the road to something different or at least a place where they would be fed.

Así pasa la gloria del mundo, me dijo Quim desde el otro extremo de la mesa.

nuestra relación se iba apagando con la velocidad ¿de qué?, de algo que se apaga muy rápido, las luces de una fábrica al acabar la jornada o mejor las luces de un edificio de oficinas, por ejemplo, presurosas de integrarse en el anonimato de la noche.

I'm mercurial, sometimes I want greatness, sometimes just its shadow.

The fact that when we die we are nothing more than worm meat---I just don't think about it.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.

But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.

No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man's life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal.

Only for a few moments, my dear. Only for a few moments.

A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.

Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.

Civilization is a transient sickness.