Edmund Waller Quotes

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

We're just a bubble in a boiling pot.

Alas for the affairs of men! When they are fortunate you might compare them to a shadow; and if they are unfortunate, a wet sponge with one dash wipes the picture away.

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.

We have to know that nothing is promised, nothing is guaranteed, especially tomorrow.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

This world's a bubble.

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

That's the nature of this business. Something that took ten years to make can crumble in an instant. It could be snatched away from you at any moment.

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

It's so easy for all the success in the world to suddenly end, and I'm quite aware of that.

Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and then... of course, they're not.

Anything that's given to you can be taken away from you at any time.

Life is so fragile.

The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

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

I have always been very obsessed with time. Time's passage makes us all very vulnerable and because we all experience it in our own way, it can make us feel very alone.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.

I don't take things for granted, because everything feels more fragile. It's made me wonder about mortality and how long you've got somebody in the world. I'm more fearful than I used to be.