David James Duncan Quotes

But the world moves on, even when you don’t want it to, even when change feels like the end of everything. It never stops. That’s harsh and magical and somewhat comforting because nothing is immutable, however much we want it to be. Moments cannot be caught like fossils in amber, ever- perfect,ever-beautiful. They go dark and raw, full of shadows, leaving you with the memories. And the world moves on.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

Time destroys everything.

Time is not kind to everything.

Time is the devourer of all things.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

To whatever end. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains. Like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the west. Behind the hills, into shadow. How did it come to this?

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!

The essence of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it can go away.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

Time touches all things with a destroying hand.

Today will die tomorrow.

Time bears away all things.

No. The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.