Fleeting Impact Quotes

You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.

A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom - it's gone.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.

... I could have said something profound, but you would have forgotten it in 15 minutes - which is the afterlife of a graduation speech.

That short, potential stir That each can make but once, That bustle so illustrious Tis almost consequence, Is the eclat of death.

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.