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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
572d9f5 No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds transience Hermann Hesse
07012be The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. words poetry living transience Virginia Woolf
3268e45 Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case. escape hopes dreams southern-california transience restlessness los-angeles escapism nightmares Michael Connelly
c232494 You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing. loss individuality memories change mom-and-pop-stores retail modern-society transience neighborhoods new-york-city consumerism Colson Whitehead
0bd8ff6 No permanence is ours; we are a wave That flows to fit whatever form it finds: Through night or day, cathedral or the cave We pass forever, craving form that binds. transience Hermann Hesse
d03ed55 There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. life transience James Salter
4624b45 I sometimes think about old tombs and weeds That interwreathe among the bones of kings With cold and poisonous berry and black flower: Or ruminate upon the skulls of steeds Frailer than shells and on those luminous wings - The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power, Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grind Into so wraith-like a translucency Of tissue-thin and aqueous bone - skeleton transience melancholy remembrance Mervyn Peake
7ebaff3 The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes. theatre humanity transience Iris Murdoch
15bc020 The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt! One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as if it had to be Montag and the people he had worked with until a few short hours ago. Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches. time books records transience preservation Ray Bradbury
bbed1f8 You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. identity transience Ursula K. Le Guin
e4bf64a "The bag was a hybrid I had picked up at a store called Suitcase City while I was plotting my comeback. [...] It had a logo on it -- a mountain ridgeline with the words "Suitcase City" printed across it like the Hollywood sign. Above it, skylights swept the horizon, completing the dream image of desire and hope. I think that logo was the real reason I liked the bag. Because I knew Suitcase City wasn't a store. It was a place. It was Los Angeles." southern-california transience restlessness los-angeles Michael Connelly
3114d80 Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life--a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple--the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last--it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first, with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer--there it is. death life philosophy transience Donna Tartt
90bcaf5 You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.) No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered. She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that. shias-engin meet-cute transience Iain M. Banks
fe9745f "I wish all this never had to change," says Rafiq, unexpectedly. I'm pleased he's content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts." transience David Mitchell
2bc1c97 The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. nature transience Henry David Thoreau
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