Fleeting Experiences Quotes

The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.

The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

it is the brevity of life which makes it tolerable; its experiences have value because they have an end.

Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.

You will miss out on some near soul mates. This goes for friendships, too. There will be unforgettable people with whom you have shared an excellent evening or a few days. Now they live in Hong Kong, and you will never see them again. That’s just how life is.

we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been

A span of a few heartbeats can make for a greater memory than the sum of a mundane year.-Catti-brie

Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.

Today's minor irritations may become tomorrow's treasured memories. We often don't know what we are missing, until it's missing.

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

Hollywood is an illusion. These intense workplaces, with very close relationships, a few months at a time - and then it ends.

The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.

Can the life of the time be caught in an advertisement? Is that how it is, really, in the meadows of the world?

The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

The flowers of life are but visionary. How many pass away and leave no trace behind! How few yield any fruit,--and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! And yet there are flowers enough; and is it not strange, my friend, that we should suffer the little that does really ripen to rot, decay, and perish unenjoyed?

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.