Quotes About Transience

The homes of so many skeletons. People who used to fight over the last blueberry muffin at the breakfast table, get down on their knees to scrub bathroom floors, and kiss one another good night, thinking they were at least relatively safe. Now they are just dust in the debris.

The world's delight is a brief dream.

Flesh that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it played no tricks of subtle control—all gone, back into the water and the sand.

Souvenirs of memory must be only that. Things to be taken up and fondled occasionally for evocation of past joys. No joy can be permanent. All is transient. This, too, shall pass away applies to all of our living universe.

Greatness is a transitory experience.

He began to realize that there might be a certain fastidious courtesy in dying without a trace - no remains, nothing, and an entire planet for a tomb.

all things/cells/beings are impermanent . . . strive for flow-permanence within. . .

The meaning of life is that it ends.

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there. There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.

There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past.

When I say something, this thing immediately and definitively loses its importance. When I write it down, it also loses it, but sometimes gains another importance.

When I say something it immediately and definitively loses its importance, when I write it down it always loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.

O God," he thought, "what a demanding job I've chosen! Day in, day out on the road. The stresses of trade are much greater than the work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I have to deal with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart. To hell with it all!

Uncertainty, aridity, peace-all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.

Our lives feel like these epochs, but really, we are dust in the wind.

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

My own idea is that these things are as piffle before the wind.

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses.