Ephemerality Quotes

“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.”
― Iain M. Banks, Excession

“because, sir, in case you don't know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps,”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“-the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don't last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you. But if any of that is evidence, I think it must be true.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“We are here but for a second, but our impact ripples through time.”
― Neetal Parekh

“I couldn't have a lifetime, but I could have this moment.”
― Erin A. Craig, The Thirteenth Child

“Why have I
thought the dew
Ephemeral when I
Shall rest so short a time, myself,
On earth?”
― Adelaide Crapsey, Verse

“I think of the snow, falling, drifting upward. Of extending the ephemeral. Spaces follow spaces, burgeoning, and the air smells so sweet.”
― Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World

“And so the milk ran dry. But first we had the luck of those creams, those spilled-down sauces, that summer of appetite that began with a soufflé cheesecake. There are very few ingredients to the recipe. Butter doesn't make the cake, nor cream. Its secret is ephemerality. Pull it from the oven and it is perfect; the next moment it is cooling, flattening, collapsing beneath the gravity of time. This is a flavor untasted by diners and critics, no record of its existence but for a private memory that lingers on one or two tongues.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Time is not the ultimately overwhelming enemy, but the temporary element through which men move towards immortality.”
― W.H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood

“And often the reflection in the pool
Dissolves us asunder:
Know the image!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Call me to you when the hour turns away,
The one which always opposes you:
It is as close to you as a dog’s face
But then it wavers, forever eluding you”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.”
― Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World

“My end is near. The wick of my life like lamp will soon extinguish. Then I will rest in peace.”
― Shiv Sangal, S

“This sinful corpse will just merge in the panch tatva.”
― Shiv Sangal, S

“Urban people celebrate death, they just invite people, dine in the name of dead; even if the dead goes to hell. Nevertheless, rustic people are different. They rejoice when someone dies; they cry.”
― Shiv Sangal, S

“We pass through this world like two gnats in a husk of millet on a boundless ocean! I grieve that life is but a moment in time, and envy the endless current of the Great River. Would that I might clasp to me some flying sprite and forever wander with him! Would that I might embrace the lightsome moon for all eternity!”
― Su Dongpo, Selections From The Works Of Su Tung-Pʻo

“Stars weave dreams on midnight’s quilt.
First rays of dawn reveal their built.”
― Amogh Swamy, On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage

“Knight’s helmet and hunter’s horn,
Wise words of those grown old,
Rage between brothers,
The lute-playing of women’s souls.

Branch upon branch urged on,
Nowhere disentangled ...
One is free! Oh, climb! ... oh, climb! ...

Ah, but they break off.
Yet one, reaching the top, bends
Into a lyre.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Human life lasts less than a moment in the temporal scale of eternity. An eternity that lies ahead of us, allowing us to “enjoy” the tranquility of our non-existence. Why not endure this tiny moment and make the most of something that will probably never happen again?”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“She will simply cherish every moment she's allocated until there are no more.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Only what is ephemeral holds value. Everything eternal is worthless.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“I am walking home from school slowly, playing a game in which it's forbidden to step on the cracks between the slabstone squares of the pavement. The sun is playing its game of lines and shadows. Nothing happens. There is nothing but this moment, in which I am walking toward home, walking in time. But suddenly, time pierces me with its sadness. This moment will not last. With every step I take, a sliver of time vanishes. Soon, I'll be home, and then this, this nowness will be the past, I think, and time seems to escape behind me, like an invisible current being sucked into an invisible vortex. How can this be, that this fullness, this me on the street, this moment which is perfectly abundant, will be gone? It's like that time I broke a large porcelain doll and no matter how much I wished it back to wholeness, it lay there on the floor in pieces. I can't do anything about this backward tug either. How many moments do I have in life? I hear my own breathing: with every breath, I am closer to death. I slow down my steps: I'm not home yet, but soon I will be, now I am much closer, but not yet… not yet… not yet… Remember this, I command myself, as if that way I could make some of it stay. When you're grown up, you'll remember this. And you'll remember how you told yourself to remember.”
― Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

“To be sure, there were all these maddening permutations of what could be that were not to be ignored—possibilities that were still too many to consider to one’s satisfaction. Yet, there was also a stunning beauty to all of this that was so profound that one could not help but love every facet of every conceivability, whether realized or beyond reach. There was so much to capture even in stillness that was akin to grasping at grains of sand so fine as to elude the grip—it was all so intricate, so overwhelming and so rapid, and nothing ever ceased in its glorious transformation that it could be sufficiently arrested and processed and thoroughly acknowledged. But still, there was an exhilaration in being engrossed in the details that evaded capture and in being oneself ensconced in constant flux so as to surrender without recourse to what was to come.

A train whistle blows and a new door is to open: the tracks have many junction points and no shortage of stopovers and destinations. Yet, there is no instance that ever becomes the destination, no circumstance the definitive possibility, and one, for that very fact, could scarcely help but be filled with a heartening love for all of creation, if, indeed, it could be called ‘creation’ and such a word held reasonable accuracy. The Moment, after all, was Always and thus there was no ‘before,’ no instance preceding the instance. There was no infinite regression of causality, no ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ and certainly no ‘take care of yourself’ that need wrench one’s heart. There was simply the EverToward: the shifting of Now and the reformulation of Then, wherein the form and essence engendered instantaneously a sculpting of arbitrary and historic juxtapositions—which, themselves, were composed of retroactively-shaped illusions.

In spite of this, there still emerges a yearning for those prehistoric elements now faded, those characters for whom one has felt an affection and who nourished one’s growth and one’s formulations of what exists—if ‘exist’ indeed suffices as a descriptor. There is twinge of loss for what was, even if it has never been or has otherwise taken on new and ersatz constructions in mind. Notwithstanding this, one cannot help but perseverate upon the hypothetical stories of a speculative childhood that presumably nurtured imagination, the scoldings that established assumptive boundary, the conjectural sacrifices that ostensibly granted sustenance. So much of one’s respiration had been populated of this air and of this interplay of actors and elements. And yet, one’s breath cycles ceaselessly through many phases on a given day. In the morning, it is yet purging itself of that mythspell of yesterday; by afternoon, it consumes the horsefeathers of new dynamics, halted again by that which passes by too fast and which can never be frozen; as evening descends, it grows slow and pensive, sometimes coughing up senescent horsefeathers and fatigued by the persistent irregularities introduced by the day itself.”
― Ashim Shanker

“Every so often night plays these little tricks. A knot of air pushes quietly through the darkness, and a feeling that has converged in some far-off place tumbles down like a falling star and lands just in front of you, and then you wake up. Two people live the same dream. All this takes place in the space of a single night, and the feeling only lasts until morning. The next morning it gets lost in the light, and you’re no longer even sure it happened. But nights like this are long. They continue forever, glittering like a jewel.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“Epitaph

'On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred'



What on Earth deserves our trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain,
What one moment calls again.
Seven years childless marriage past,
A Son, a son is born at last:
So exactly lim’d and fair,
Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air,
As a long life promised,
Yet, in less than six weeks dead.
Too promising, too great a mind
In so small room to be confined:
Therefore, as fit in Heaven to dwell,
He quickly broke the Prison shell.
So the subtle Alchemist,
Can’t with Hermes Seal resist
The powerful spirit’s subtler flight,
But t’will bid him long good night.
And so the Sun if it arise
Half so glorious as his Eyes,
Like this Infant, takes a shrowd,
Buried in a morning Cloud.”
― Katherine Philips

“Tell zeal it wants devotion;
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it is but motion;
Tell flesh it is but dust.
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth;
Tell honor how it alters;
Tell beauty how she blasteth;
Tell favor how it falters.
And as they shall reply,
Give every one the lie.”
― Sir Walter Raleigh

“Emil, the oldest of my cousins, with his bright blond moustache and a face that life seemed to have wiped clean of any expression [...]

His face, withered and clouded, seemed day by day to be forgetting itself, turning into an empty white wall covered with a pale network of veins, in which the dwindling memories of a tumultuous and wasted life intertwined like the lines on a faded map... With his eyes wandering over distant memories, he told strange anecdotes, which always broke off abruptly, disintegrating and dissipating into nothingness [...]

His face was the mere breath of a face–a streak that some unkonwn passer-by had left behind in the air.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“When I am gone,
may the dust of me
settle on unknown shores..
carried by winds
I never felt,
under skies
I never touched..
so that, at last,
I may belong to everywhere.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul

“We are given this moment.
To hold gently.
To fill with meaning.
and then let go.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul