Transient Experience Quotes

Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

I enjoyed my time in Houston but it was short-lived and it really didn't make a huge impression on my life.

It lasted but a year of two, till all the routes were done. The pace so fast that most forgot that climbing could be fun.

TV happens. And once it's happened, it's gone. When it's gone, you move on, no tears, no tantrums, no videotape.

everything you experience is what constitutes you as a human being, but the experience passes away and the person's left. The person is the residue.

One gets, sensitive about losing mornings after getting a little used to them with living in a country. Each one of these endlessly varied daybreaks is an opera but once performed.

We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand.

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny - very tiny. Content.

Over time as an actor, your life with a project can be so short lived because you come on, you do it, and then you're done. You have no control, no say, and all of a sudden there's all of this distance between the work you've put into something and the product as you see it appear on-screen.

..and me holding this moment that was as fragile as a bird in my hands

I think part of the reason ideas haven't come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It's experienced and then forgotten.

Sometimes you write passages that don't need to be rewritten. Performance is that for me. Improvisation, things that happen in the moment, are sometimes wonderful, or wonderful as a moment to be shared between performer and people, but that's it. There might be a strong bond between you and the people, a transformative night, but as a live record it might not translate.

Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.

Exhibitions are kind of ephemeral moments, sometimes magic moments, and when they're gone, they're gone.

That's how all theater should be done - you only have one chance to see it and then it's gone. One night only.