Life Passage Quotes

Time is the fire in which we burn.

We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be.

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

Honestly, I didn't realize it - all of a sudden, I was 90. The years skipped by quickly. When it happened, I said, 'Where did the time go?'

I don't like ageing, I don't like being older, time is going too fast, and life is like a train running at high speed. I have a real problem with it.

Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.

At the age of 60, you see how short the runway is in front of you and how long the runway is behind you, and that you don't have much time left.

I suppose it's amazing how quick life goes by when you have children.

I enjoy the time passing. I think it's a privilege to be in friendship with time.

Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the Road Which to discover we must travel too.

In secret pleasure — secret tears This changeful life has slipped away

The days are long, but the years are short.

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

Death must be got through as life had been, just somehow.

Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

From a personal standpoint, I'd say that, yeah, seeing how quickly children grow, you realize how fast life goes by.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

It's this thing that's going on all the time - aging. Paul Auster quotes the poet George Opren on growing old: "What a strange thing to happen to a little boy." Which I think is so profound.

We pass through this world but once.

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?

I've been in a multimedia extravaganza for 50 years and it's gone by so quickly that it's unimaginable. And it's also a major part of my life that has gone by.

Sometimes when you're going through life you're not really noticing it.