John Knowles Quotes

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

After a while you learn that everything stops.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

Mean and mighty, rotting Together, have one dust.

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

Nothing is lasting but change; nothing perpetual but death.

Even Castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.

There's nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it.

Everything in life is just for a while.

Everything, no matter how beautiful, is only with us for awhile.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

There's no sense that you're there forever. No parent is there forever.

song of elli (old age) "What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain What is gone is gone... What is sea-born dies on land, Soft is trod upon. What is given burns the hand - What is gone is gone... Here is there, and high is low; All may be undone. What is true, no two men know - What is gone is gone... Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose - What is gone is gone.

All things are subject to decay and change.

Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored