ephemerality Quotes

“The spring can’t last.”

“Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. ”

“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”

“But it all zipped by. One minute Marlena and I were in it up to our eyeballs, and next thing we knew the kids were borrowing the car and fleeing the coop for college. And now, here I am. In my nineties and alone.”

“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”

“Time just gets away from us.”

“Even though it clings to things of beauty, if their beauty is outside God and outside the soul, it only clings to sorrow.”

“We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated.[...] No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes.”

“That’s what life is about: People come and go.”

“Pestilence, disease, and war haunt this sorry place. And nothing lasts forever; that’s a truth we have to face.”

″[A plant] is a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It’s absurd to attach an emotion to something so brief and pointless.”

“Let’s play hopscotch in malls. Let’s drive fast with the top down. Let’s turn up the music as loud as it’ll go. Let’s put a couch on an island in the middle of the freeway and wave at everyone on their way to work. Let’s hug strangers in parking lots. Let’s hand out secret messages at traffic lights. Let’s make lists of all the things that make us smile and tick them off, one at a time. The world will carry on without you and me when we’re gone. Let it carry on without us, today.”

“Neither be cynical about love – for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass.”

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don’t burn the paintings in the Louvre, that’s all.”

“I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great—ideas, work—it’s all dust and ashes.”