“
Don't try to fix me, I'm not broken...
”
”
Evanescence
“
If people make fun of you, that probably means you're doing something right.
”
”
Evanescence
“
I want to love you simply, in words not spoken: tinder to the flame which transforms it to ash
I want to love you simply, in signs not expressed: clouds to the rain which make them evanescent (Aku Ingin-I Want)
”
”
Sapardi Djoko Damono
“
The ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in beams.
”
”
عطار نیشابوری (The Conference of the Birds)
“
Inspiration comes in the middle of the night when you should be doing homework.
”
”
Evanescence
“
When illness and old age are no longer indulgent and strength is irrevocably seeping away, brightness fades insidiously away from the light of the day and time only betrays reckless evanescence. (“Into a new life”)
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.
”
”
Ruskin Bond
“
Don't be afraid of the shadows, that only means there's a light nearby.
”
”
Evanescence
“
Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
”
”
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
“
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
”
”
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
“
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
”
”
Alain de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness)
“
Let's look at the bright side of life, even if love has only been a long shot and become evanescent, it may still inspire us if we have the gift to savor the fragrance of the treasured moments of togetherness from memorable times that furtively slipped away. ("Waiting for the smoke signals")
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: "What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?"
He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening — I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.
”
”
Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)
“
The home we seek is in eternity;
The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop.
This ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.
Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems --
Which matters more, the body or the soul?
Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole.
”
”
Attar of Nishapur
“
When you go through tragedy, you can either let that destroy you and you become bitter and never let it go, or you can let it make you stronger and let it make you grow. And that's what I did. My lyrics are coming from a place that I want people to relate to and feel that they're not alone.
”
”
Evanescence
“
People told me I can't dress like a fairy. I say, I'm in a rock band and I cand do whatever the hell I want!
”
”
Evanescence
“
I think that our lyrics are definitely dark, but I know for a fact that we pull our inspiration from a million different influences. We listened to everything growing up. Our music isn't just 'opera metal' or 'gothic pop' it's just Evanescence.
”
”
Evanescence
“
All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.
”
”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)
“
Nobody's perfect. I'm perfectly flawed.
”
”
Evanescence
“
It's okay to laugh at me, I only look scary.
”
”
Evanescence
“
Forget the place you're trying to get to and see the beauty in right now...
”
”
Evanescence
“
I like to use two basic elements for my clothing: rock... you know, metal and chains and stuff - mixed with fairies and drama and Victorian clothing - fantasy.
”
”
Evanescence
“
Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.
”
”
William Clark
“
This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.
”
”
Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crowd)
“
I could have mixed a thousand colors together, but I would never have been able to paint his eyes as I saw them then, in all their evanescent beauty. - Breena Malloy about Kian from Bitter Frost by Kailin Gow.
”
”
Kailin Gow (Bitter Frost (Frost, #1))
“
Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.
”
”
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
“
Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
”
”
Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone: Essays)
“
It's dark, spooky, and I LOVE it!
”
”
Amy Lee
“
If people make fun fun of you, you must be doing something right
”
”
Evanescence
“
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
”
”
Eugène Ionesco
“
...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
“
I know how it feels to be completely alone and helpless, and the last thing you want to hear in that situation is, 'It's going to be OK.' "The only thing that seems to really help is that someone else who has felt that low expressing those feelings to you.
”
”
Evanescence
“
Perfect by nature, icons of self indulgence. Just what we need more lies about our world.
”
”
Evanescence
“
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday
”
”
Virginia Woolf (On Fiction (On Series))
“
Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.
”
”
Bill Buford (Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany)
“
Dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory.
”
”
Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)
“
This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, not that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water... and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris... This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk... and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk - and try as he would he couldn't fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way - it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day.
”
”
Patrick Süskind (Perfume The Story of a Murderer)
“
It might not look it but rocking in a corset is harder than you think
”
”
Evanescence
“
The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
”
”
Jean Cocteau (The Holy Terrors)
“
How can you see into my eyes like open doors
Leading you down into my core
Where I've become so numb without a soul
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
Until you find it there and lead it back home
”
”
Evanescence (Bring Me to Life)
“
And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place, with its turrets of mistly blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening onto the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day . . . that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rocks and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place.
”
”
Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)
“
Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.
”
”
Marge Piercy (Braided Lives)
“
Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations.
”
”
Mary Catherine Bateson (Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way)
“
None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself.
”
”
Christopher Priest (The Islanders)
“
Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be
barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment.
”
”
Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
“
Wanting me, watching me. I can feel you pull me down.
”
”
Evanescence
“
I was like, 'Dude, make me look bad. Please. I want to look ugly. I want to wear orange pants.
”
”
Evanescence
“
I feel that from the very beginning life played a terrible conjurer’s trick on me. I lost faith in it. It seems to me that every moment now it is playing tricks on me. So that when I hear love I am not sure it is love, and when I hear gaiety I am not sure it is gaiety, and when I have eaten and loved and I am all warm from wine, I am not sure it is either love or food or wine, but a strange trick being played on me, an illusion, slippery and baffling and malicious, and a magician hangs behind me watching the ecstasy I feel at the things which happen so that I know deep down it is all fluid and escaping and may vanish at any moment. Don’t forget to write me a letter and tell me I was here, and I saw you, and loved you, and ate with you. It is all so evanescent and I love it so much, I love it as you love the change in the days.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 2: 1934-1939)
“
Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.
”
”
Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)
“
Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.
”
”
Marge Piercy
“
Truly human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
”
”
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (Rashomon and Other Stories (Tuttle Classics))
“
Everything in this universe is evanescent. Because it is evanescent, it is also precious. Spend this precious moment wisely and beautifully.
”
”
Haemin Sunim (The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World)
“
That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.
”
”
Susan Vreeland
“
I am Evanescence. I am the only band member. I have basically hired the band. Evanescence has become me. It is mine and it's exactly how I want it to be.
”
”
Evanescence
“
Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light.
”
”
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
“
My mother spoke, alive again inside my brain...She spoke and I listened to her, because I was afraid if I didn't her voice would gradually fade away, an evanescent wraith of a thing that would narrow to a pinpoint of light and then go out, lost forever, like the Tinker Bell if no one clapped for her.
”
”
Anna Quindlen (One True Thing)
“
Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.
”
”
Elizabeth Alexander (The Light of the World)
“
Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.
My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.
Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make out of temper with every sentence of my own.
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
Seen on a night in November
How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumn, evanescent, wan,
The moon.
”
”
Adelaide Crapsey (Verse)
“
Is there a relative value of beauty? Is evanescence - fleetingness - a necessary element of the thing that most moves us? A shooting star dazzles more than the sun. A child captivates like an elf, but grows into grossness, an ogre, a harpy. A flower splays itself into color - the lilies of the field! - more treasured than any painting of a flower. But of all these things, women's grace, shooting stars, flowers, and paintings, only a painting endures.
”
”
Gregory Maguire (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister)
“
Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes.
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
Like other artists, my river is temperamental; there is no predicting when the mood to paint will come upon him, or how long it will last. But in midsummer, when the great white fleets cruise the sky for day after flawless day, it is worth strolling down to the sandbars just to see whether he has been at work.
”
”
Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There)
“
But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion of data on which you depend - without it you would not be yourself. Impossible to share and no one else could view it anyway. The past is out ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
”
”
Penelope Lively (How It All Began)
“
The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
”
”
Thomas Merton
“
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.
”
”
Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)
“
The snow crystals . . . come to us not only to reveal the wondrous beauty of the minute in Nature, but to teach us that all earthly beauty is transient and must soon fade way. But though the beauty of the snow is evanescent, like the beauties of the autumn, as of the evening sky, it fades but to come again.
”
”
Wilson A. Bentley
“
And even if something had once been committed to paper, did it mean that it was still true? Always true? Unlike the relative permanence of paint, words were temporal. You uttered them and they evanesced, but if you wrote them, they remained, though whether the written word was any more truthful than the spoken was a mystery to her. Only paint was honest.
”
”
Robin Oliveira (I Always Loved You)
“
And just like that, he's dead. My one love, my soul mate, my forever, is dead.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
In this life, all is Evanescent. Live for the now
”
”
Carlyle Labuschagne
“
Of course I need not remind you how fluid a thing thought is with me-- with us all-- and of what an evanescent substance are our emotions made.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde)
“
Her face too was fresh in colour, but it was of a totally different quality - soft and evanescent, like the light under a heap of rose-petals.
”
”
Thomas Hardy (The Withered Arm and Other Stories)
“
In some lights they were hardly there at all, just visible as a drifting quality in the light, a rhythmic evanescence, like veils of transparency turning before a mirror.
”
”
Philip Pullman (The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2))
“
Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.
”
”
Ruth Ozeki (All Over Creation)
“
I swear love is the most powerful emotion thats ever existed. It owns people, devours them, tears them open and bleeds them out from the inside, making them defenseless to everything. Hate is the same way. Hate takes your levelheadedness and even your sanity away from you.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
“
Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its abscence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed.
In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histor's blinkers.
...This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment.
Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
”
”
Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
“
From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Glory)
“
Take fireflies for example. Try to imagine their beauty, the evanescent beauty of their lives, which don't even last a week.
Female fireflies flash their lights only to have intercourse with the males; males twinkle just to have intercourse with the females. And once their mating has finished, they die. In short, their reproductive instinct is the single, absolute reason for fireflies to live. In that simple instinct and their simple world, no kind of sadness can intervene. This is precisely why fireflies are so fleetingly beautiful.
”
”
Tatsuhiko Takimoto (Welcome to the N.H.K.)
“
Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
”
”
John Ruskin
“
We're high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it's fleeting and evanescence. And we're getting worse -- checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.
”
”
Deborah Meyler (The Bookstore)
“
The sea-lentils tied to giant serpentine string beans, sea-liquor brine, sea-lyme grass, sea-moss, sea-cucumbers. He never knew the sea had such a lavish garden—sea-plumes, sea-grapes, sea-lungs. […] The sky put on its own evanescent spectacles, a pivoting stage, fugitive curtains, decors for ballets, floating icebergs, unrolled bolts of chiffon, gold and pearl necklaces, marabous of oyster white, scarves of Indian saris, flying feathers, shorn lambs, geometric architecture in snows and cotton. His theater was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself.
”
”
Anaïs Nin
“
Life is an isle of sorrow, you live today and die tomorrow!
”
”
Tove Jansson (Sculptor's Daughter)
“
The lights became stars,
which became streaks
in the grayspace,
and then networks
of fading
shimmers
”
”
Ashim Shanker
“
Inside the museums, | Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
”
”
Bob Dylan
“
Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is?
”
”
Claire Messud (The Woman Upstairs)
“
There is nothing more beautiful, I think, than the evanescent fleeting images and sentiments presented by a language one is just becoming familiar with—ideas that flit across the mental sky, shaped and tinted by capricious fancy.
”
”
Helen Keller (The Story of my life; with her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan)
“
I kiss him back, smiling, because I know hes right. And I know well be together. Forever.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
I'm retarded and I'm on TV
”
”
Evanescence
“
Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an ‘impression’, intensely subjective and evanescent.
”
”
Geoffrey Harvey (Thomas Hardy (Routledge Guides to Literature))
“
When my heart is broken as usual
over someone's evanescent beauty
and design after design
they fade like kingdoms with no writing
”
”
Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing)
“
A dozen or more boats on the lake swung their rosy and moon–like lanterns low on the water, that reflected as from a fire. In the distance, the steamer twanged and thrummed and washed with her faintly–splashing paddles, trailing her strings of coloured lights, and occasionally lighting up the whole scene luridly with an effusion of fireworks, Roman candles and sheafs of stars and other simple effects, illuminating the surface of the water, and showing the boats creeping round, low down. Then the lovely darkness fell again, the lanterns and the little threaded lights glimmered softly, there was a muffled knocking of oars and a waving of music.
Gudrun paddled almost imperceptibly. Gerald could see, not far ahead, the rich blue and the rose globes of Ursula’s lanterns swaying softly cheek to cheek as Birkin rowed, and iridescent, evanescent gleams chasing in the wake. He was aware, too, of his own delicately coloured lights casting their softness behind him.
”
”
D.H. Lawrence (Women in Love)
“
I'll never give up. Gemma is my soul mate, my other half, the only girl Ive ever loved. Weve been through hell together. Hell, weve died and then came back to life because of our love
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
I have nothing to offer you' said Hactar faintly, 'but tricks of the light. It is possible to be comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all you have.'
His voice evanesced, and in the dark a long, velvet paisley-covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape.
... At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.
”
”
Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #3))
“
And as he went about arranging and as he sat talking there seemed something false about him and out of tune.Watching him unknown she said to herself there was no stability about him. He was when he was in one mood. And now he looked paltry and insignificant. There was nothing stable about him. Her husband had more manly dignity. At any rate he did not waft about with any wind. There was something evanescent about Morel she thought something shifting and false. He would never make sure ground for any woman to stand on. She despised him rather for his shrinking together getting smaller. Her husband at least was manly and when he was beaten gave in. but this other would never own to being beaten. He would shift round and round, get smaller.
”
”
D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers)
“
It struck me tonight how music mirrors life. Fleeting ephemeral moments, made up of beauty, sadness, joy, hope and despair. Melodies which are written in both major and minor keys. Flowing and fleeting. You can’t hold onto it, or keep it from changing. Our emotions possess the evanescence of a note.
”
”
Virginia Burges
“
Facts are often faint and flickering. They are the achievements of subtle investigations that must painstakingly stabilize evanescent effects or ingeniously combine several strands of evidence into a strong, weight-bearing cord. Above all, as their etymology suggests, [...] the most interesting and useful facts are not given but made, artifacts in the best sense of the word.
”
”
Lorraine Daston
“
He is perhaps fifteen—not truly a young man yet, but certainly well on his way—and he walks with the energy and indifference of one who possesses the luxury of youth but not yet the experience to appreciate its value or evanescence.
”
”
John Burley (The Absence of Mercy)
“
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
”
”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“
Perhaps he found beauty saddening – I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die.
”
”
Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)
“
We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings, which are, in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent. In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts. We do not just let ourselves be happy or sad, for instance; we must become a happy person or a sad one. This is the chronic tendency of the ignorant or deluded mind, to make “things” out of that which is no thing.
”
”
Mark Epstein (Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective)
“
I think of the moment in time when everything changed. A moment that caused so much evil. The moment the Star fell from the sky. Then, I picture it never falling, disappearing, vanishing into thin air. I concentrate on that moment as warmth spreads throughout my body and I feel time fading, like the morning mist. Evanescence.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.
”
”
H. Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture: 50th Anniversary Edition―Being True to Christ in a Materialistic Age (Torchbooks))
“
EFFERVESCENCE AND EVANESCENCE
We've found this Scott Fitzgerald chap
A chipper charming child;
He's taught us how the flappers flap,
And why the whipper-snappers snap,
What makes the women wild.
But now he should make haste to trap
The ducats in his dipper.
The birds that put him on the map
Will shortly all begin to rap
And flop to something flipper.
”
”
Keith Preston (Splinters)
“
Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny
”
”
Joseph Conrad (The Secret Sharer)
“
SOME PAINTINGS become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in the mind's eye.
”
”
Aldo Leopold
“
Fear is only in our minds but it's taking over all the time.
”
”
Evanescence
“
light and evanescent but held together by bolts of iron
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.
”
”
Rae Armantrout (Versed)
“
Reconciliation to the evanescent is revelation of the eternal.
”
”
John Wood Oman
“
Kitty!” “Wishes are evanescent,
”
”
Colleen McCullough (Bittersweet)
“
Evanescent grace, you vanish as a vapor
does, or love in open air.
”
”
Jill Alexander Essbaum (Heaven)
“
At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up,” writes Antonio Damasio. “It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
Etchings endure,
But not in Sand
Meanings Collide
To Unresolved Fragments
Codes fizzle to Static
They are not lost
But Unheard
Never lost
Fading slowly to Silence
By infinite degrees
”
”
Ashim Shanker (Sinew of the Social Species)
“
Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy. Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned.
”
”
Anita Brookner
“
Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.
”
”
Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)
“
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.
”
”
John Updike (Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism)
“
it was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. It was a comrade.
”
”
E.M. Forster (The Works of E. M. Forster)
“
It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering phosphorescence, tiny veins of a light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer of nightmarish substances. Likewise, when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smolder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories.
”
”
Bruno Schulz (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)
“
There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. The epistolary novel expresses love in a beautiful emulation of images and metaphors. To tell a love, one must write. One never writes too much. How many lovers, upon returning home from the tenderest of rendezvous, open their writing desks! Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving. A realist passion will see nothing there but evanescent formulas. But just the same it is no less true that great passions are prepared by great reveries. The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness.
”
”
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos)
“
It rushes through me, like razor sharp poison, jagged edges catching my skin, tearing me apart on the inside. Everything. Every blissful moment. Every promise. Every kiss. Hug. Word. Touch. Breath. Every single second Ive spent with him, will be gone. I won't know it.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
Every blessed space is both child and grandchild of dissolution,
for that which is stored up drains away. And Daphne, in her metamorphosis,
as she feels herself becoming a laurel, wishes that you evanesce into the wind.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus)
“
After our last child left for college, I struggled. The full life it had taken years, decades, to build had vanished, as evanescent as the mist. They all came home for Thanksgiving, and I—who had spent so much of their childhood despairing that I would never again have a moment to myself—followed them around like a girl spurned but loving still, ashamed. They are building their own lives now, and when they left home to return to them, I took myself to the woods. Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.
”
”
Margaret Renkl (The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)
“
Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.
”
”
Elizabeth Alexander (The Light of the World)
“
We must not despair the evanescent nature of time or our brief existence; we must embrace our delectable moment on earth. Life is a fantastic dream where we rejoice in the incomparable beauty of this misty world of ethereal sensations and sentiments. Buddha said, “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” We must swim with the tide and rejoice in life of memory, dreams, and the beauty that is transpiring before our very eyes. Indian Buddhist teacher and philosopher Nagarjuna advises in “The Diamond Sutra,” to enjoy the dream world, “Thus shall you think of this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream; a flash of lightening in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
It was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air.
”
”
E.M. Forster (Howards End)
“
A far horizon
embraced by cloud
like a nameless God
beautiful and evaporating
”
”
Tamara Rendell (Mystical Tides)
“
It didn’t matter what he’d said or done in life, in death he was innocent.
”
”
Callie Hunter (Disenchanted)
“
In today’s hypercompetitive environment enabled by technology, ownership of infrastructure no longer provides a defensible advantage. Instead, flexibility provides the crucial competitive edge, competition is perpetual motion, and advantage is evanescent.
”
”
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You)
“
Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for an evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1))
“
The Aurora!"
Her wonder was so strong that she had to clutch the rail to keep from falling.
The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish. In the evanescent delicacy she felt something as profound as she'd felt close to the bear. She was moved by it: it was so beautiful it was almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes, and the tears splintered the light even further into prismatic rainbows.
”
”
Philip Pullman (Northern Lights)
“
And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: "I heard Youth calling in the night: 'Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky— Yea, I am Youth because I die!
”
”
Jack London (John Barleycorn)
“
There is one true property of romantic love: it never stays - evanescence is a part of the nature of an infatuated love state. But be careful trying to rush its demise. Don't try to joust with love any more than you would with powerful religious beliefs - those are duels you cannot win.
”
”
Irvin D. Yalom (The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients)
“
But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has the dream a meaning—can sense be made of each single dream as of other mental syntheses?
”
”
Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)
“
Nothing testified more to the evanescence of position and wealth in Beverly Hills than its architecture. There was money in abundance to put up the settings of the grand life. But land—the one true mark of stable grandeur—was not to be had. The town was an industrial compound of the temporarily well-paid.
”
”
Herman Wouk (Youngblood Hawke)
“
Anyone can have a pretty face, but the most beautiful things are the most fleeting. If we lived in a world of perpetual sunsets and cherry blossoms, they would become common and their colors would soon look dull. But for the evanescent moments that I exist, I am the most beautiful thing anyone has ever seen.
”
”
Kylie Lee Baker (The Blood Orchid (The Scarlet Alchemist, #2))
“
But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms.
”
”
Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
“
Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.
”
”
Don DeLillo (Great Jones Street)
“
It’s because we’re all emotion junkies,” he says. He does not look like an emotion junkie. “We’re high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it is fleeting and evanescent. And we’re getting worse—checking texts and e-mails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.
”
”
Deborah Meyler (The Bookstore)
“
Lose Yourself—Eminem Monsters—Shinedown Dear God—XTC Down with the Sickness—Disturbed Love and War—Fleurie Headstrong—Trapt I Want It That Way—Backstreet Boys Sober—Tool Angels Fall—Breaking Benjamin Black is the Soul—Korn Polyamorous—Breaking Benjamin Best Thing I Never Had—Beyoncé Bed of Lies—Nicki Minaj ft Skylar Grey Apologize—Timbaland ft OneRepublic Spastik—Plastikman Basiel—Amelie Lens Oh Bondage! Up Yours!—X Ray Spex Open Your Eyes—Disturbed Bring Me to Life—Evanescence So What—Pink Light My Fire—The Doors
”
”
B.B. Reid (Lilac)
“
I think about everything; good and bad. I think about the pain Ive experienced, the fear, the love, the passion, the kisses, the friendships. The way it feels when Alex touches me. I think about what it took to get there and I think about how briefly it stayed before it vanished. Its a moment in my life that Ill remember forever, yet, I wont. Because itll never actually happen. All I do is nod, but its enough that he understands.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.
”
”
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
“
Humans do not stare at other humans’ buttocks,” he reprimands.
”
”
M.J. Marstens (Evanescent (Liminal Academy, #1))
“
As for perfectionism, those of us who have spent time inside the TNO studio know that something so evanescent and silly comes about only through prodigiously hard work.
”
”
Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy)
“
D’ye know where the hands got to?” it asked, vigorous and evanescent at the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept away from Jukes instantly.
”
”
Joseph Conrad (Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels)
“
Writing fixes the evanescence of sound and holds it against death.
”
”
Edward Hirsch (Best American Poetry 2016 (The Best American Poetry series))
“
I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about the
business, that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of
common men should settle each other's marriages between them; the
question remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when
they say that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying
and evanescent authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it?
Who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist's
verb? In a large number of cases I think we can simply say that the
individual Eugenist means himself, and nobody else.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton
“
Everyone has a destiny, Gemma, my moms voice fills my thoughts. Yours is just more important. I always knew it would be, since the day you were born. She smiles brightly. My violet-eyed girl. Youre going to do great things, but itll be hard. Youll be tested, more than you already have. But no matter what, you can never lose yourself. You have to fight, no matter what, Gemma. Never, ever give up.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
Just last night everything had seemed perfect. Well, not perfect. The world was still being tortured with Fey and Lost Souls, but, between Alex and me, everything was amazing. We were connected in every single way possible and not like how we were when we had the Stars energy in us. Everything was raw, breathtaking, moving, blissful. And then poof, once again the feelings are gone. Because hes gone.
”
”
Jessica Sorensen (The Evanescence (Fallen Souls, #2))
“
Descartes said that animals were automata. I have always been certain that it was the threat of torture that stopped him saying the same held true for human beings. Neither I nor Matthew had time for souls. That we were intricate chemical machines never diminished our sense of wonder, our reverence for Vermeer and for Monet, our floating bodies in the salty water, our evanescent joy before the dying of the light.
”
”
Peter Carey (The Chemistry of Tears)
“
Alexander looked her over up and down. Tatiana exuded a porous, evanescent, yet everlasting warmth; her very presence, her satin face in his palm made his back hurt less. Her radiant eyes, her flushed cheeks, her slightly parted loving lips…Alexander stared at her, his eyes wide open, his soul wide open, his adoring heart hurting exquisitely. “You are an angel sent from heaven, aren’t you?” An electric smile lit up her face. “And you don’t know the half of it,” she whispered. “You don’t know what your Tania has been cooking up here.” In her delight she nearly squealed. “What have you been cooking up? No, don’t sit up. I want to feel your face.” “Shura, I can’t. I’m practically on top of you. We need to be very careful.” The smile faded an octave. “Dimitri walks around here all the time. Walks in, out, checks on you, leaves, comes back. What’s he worried about? He was quite surprised to find me here.” “He’s not the only one. How did you get here?” “All part of my plan, Alexander.” “What plan is this, Tatiana?” She whispered, “To be with you when I die of old age.” “Oh, that plan.
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
“
A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr’s quantum leaps, against Heisenberg’s world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.
”
”
Carlo Rovelli (Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution)
“
The East and the West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the
soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
”
”
Kakuzō Okakura (The Book of Tea)
“
She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made—in other and higher words, after the will of God.
”
”
George MacDonald (Mary Marston)
“
Fireworks are beautiful because they are so ephemeral. They're precious because they're evanescent, and because they're evanescent, we have to remember them.
We knew everything would one day disappear, but we are all gathered here together under the fireworks. When we are together, a moment is transformed into an eternity. I decided to believe that something is left behind even after all the fireworks are gone. And for now, just believing that was enough
”
”
Big Hit Entertainment (花樣年華 HYYH The Notes 2 (The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, #2))
“
It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent, and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences. Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging.
”
”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
“
As we’ve realised, the more our days are filled with new, unpredictable and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. Conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in an evanescent blur.
”
”
The School of Life (What They Forgot to Teach You at School)
“
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, they accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning to the end.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Modern Fiction)
“
There is a strange sensation often experienced in the presence
of an audience. It may proceed from the gaze of the many eyes that
turn upon the speaker, especially if he permits himself to steadily
return that gaze. Most speakers have been conscious of this in a
nameless thrill, a real something, pervading the atmosphere,
tangible, evanescent, indescribable. All writers have borne
testimony to the power of a speaker's eye in impressing an
audience. This influence which we are now considering is the
reverse of that picture—the power their eyes may
exert upon him, especially before he begins to speak: after the
inward fires of oratory are fanned into flame the eyes of the
audience lose all terror.
”
”
William Pittenger (Extempore Speech: How to Acquire and Practice It)
“
I am afraid I am not quite so much the man of the world as might be good for me in some points. My feelings are not quite so evanescent, nor my memory of the past under such easy dominion as one finds to be the case with men of the world.
”
”
Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
“
Tonight, no one will rage and cry: "My Kingdom for a horse!" No ghost will come to haunt the battlements of a castle in the kingdom of Denmark where, apparently something is rotten. Nor will anyone wring her hands and murmur: "Leave, I do not despise you." Three still young women will not retreat to a dacha whispering the name of Moscow, their beloved, their lost hope. No sister will await the return of her brother to avenge the death of their father, no son will be forced to avenge an affront to his father, no mother will kill her three children to take revenge on their father. And no husband will see his doll-like wife leave him out of contempt. No one will turn into a rhinoceros. Maids will not plot to assassinate their mistress, after denouncing her lover and having him jailed. No one will fret about "the rain in Spain!" No one will emerge from a garbage pail to tell an absurd story. Italian families will not leave for the seashore. No soldier will return from World War II and bang on his father's bedroom dor protesting the presence of a new wife in his mother's bed. No evanescent blode will drown. No Spanish nobleman will seduce a thousand and three women, nor will an entire family of Spanish women writhe beneath the heel of the fierce Bernarda Alba. You won't see a brute of a man rip his sweat-drenched T-shirt, shouting: "Stella! Stella!" and his sister-in-law will not be doomed the minute she steps off the streetcar named Desire. Nor will you see a stepmother pine away for her new husband's youngest son. The plague will not descend upon the city of Thebes, and the Trojan War will not take place. No king will be betrayed by his ungrateful daughters. There will be no duels, no poisonings, no wracking coughs. No one will die, or, if someone must die, it will become a comic scene. No, there will be none of the usual theatrics. What you will see tonight is a very simple woman, a woman who will simply talk...
”
”
Michel Tremblay
“
I was on a lit path, a raging firestorm for him – all of him. My body ached for it. I had found the antidote to my disease, and in those forced images of false memories, I found my salvation, a cure from myself, to what I would eventually become.
”
”
Carlyle Labuschagne
“
Her mind then was filled with tenderness and regret… To cut an overgrown branch saddened her because it had once lived, and life was dear to her. Yes, and at the same time the fall of the branch would suggest to her how she must die herself and all the futility and evanescence of things. And then again quickly catching this thought up, with her instant good sense, she thought life had treated her well; even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (A Haunted House And Other Short Stories)
“
My evanescent anarchistic tendencies are purely classical. I use the word anarchist in the sense in which it was understood by the ancient Greeks. They, of course, accepted the anarchist as a fairly respectable--if somewhat vehement--opponent of government encroachment on the individual's rights to think and act freely. It is in this sense that I glimpse myself as an anarchist--regretting the growth of government and the ever-increasing trend toward regulation and, worst of all, standardization of human activity.
”
”
J. Paul Getty (How to Be Rich)
“
This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved her parents to see their first born
Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
Without permission, to get ill and find indigence
Until she was down to her last sixpence.
”
”
Ian McEwan (Atonement)
“
This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved her parents to see their first bourn
Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
Without permission, to get ill and find indigence
Until she was down to her last sixpence.
”
”
Ian McEwan (Atonement)
“
We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago.
”
”
Marguerite Yourcenar (L'Œuvre au noir)
“
Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot,the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition? The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; but suggesting that the proper stuff for fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
Evolution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners through geological deep time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (Climbing Mount Improbable)
“
Each of us attempted to stem & hold fast the unending flood of his thoughts which tended to trickle off into that inner void. Our personalities were in an evanescent state, with sudden fits of remembering, faint intimations from the senses, irradiations from the subconscious, degenerate appetites & a most insidious lassitude. Everyone knows these little manikins of elder-pith that have a pellet of lead at the base so that they always stand up on their feet, no matter how one puts them down. Imagine that the leaden pellets are a little off center. One figure will lean to the right, another to the rear, another will bow its head or almost lie down. So it was with us. We had lost our balance, our sense of individuality, the perpendicular of our lives; our conscience was adrift, was sinking to the bottom, & we have no ballast to drop. We were out of kilter.
”
”
Blaise Cendrars (Moravagine)
“
She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.
”
”
Joan Didion (Play It as It Lays)
“
Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist.
”
”
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
“
Let us live, therefore, cheerfully, although there be no lasting joy in mortal things, whose substance is evanescent, inane, and vacuous. But if there is any good thing by which you would adorn this stage of life, we have not of such been cheated - rest, serenity, modesty, self-restraint, orderliness, change, fun, entertainment, society, temperance, sleep, food, drink, riding, sailing, walking, keeping abreast of events, meditation, contemplation, education, piety, marriage, feasting, the satisfaction of recalling an orderly disposition of the past, cleanliness, water, fire, listening to music, looking at all about one, talks, stories, history, liberty, continence, little birds, puppies, cats, consolation of death, and the common flux of time, fate and fortune, over the afflicted and the favoured alike. There is a good hope for things beyond all hope; good in the exercise of some art in which one is skilled; good in meditating upon the manifold transmutation of all nature and upon the magnitude of Earth.
”
”
Girolamo Cardano
“
I had an argument with time. It cost me half a decade of counting yesterdays...
”
”
Maria-Cristina Necula (Evanescent)
“
When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears.
When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears.
And I held your hand through all of these years..
”
”
Evanescence
“
Because this is my land. I can feel it, tremendous, still primeval, looming, musing downward upon the tent, the camp—this whole puny evanescent clutter of human sojourn which after our two weeks will vanish, and in another week will be completely healed, traceless in this unmarked solitude. It is mine, though I have never owned a foot of it, and never will. I have never wanted to, not even after I saw that it is doomed, not even after I began to watch it retreat year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and plow. Because there was never any one for me to acquire and possess it from because it had belonged to no one man. It belonged to all; we had only to use it well, humbly, and with pride.
”
”
William Faulkner (Big Woods)
“
I wanted to go to her, but not yet. What did you say to someone who had just lost a loved one? A mother. I had not earned the right to empathize with such loss. I did not have the words, nor the true emotions, as I had never had such a thing as a mother., I had never experienced anything the way she had. It was clear to me what I was in that moment –- a product of the Council.
”
”
Carlyle Labuschagne
“
The past cannot be lost in the present. Not even memories were lost, because memories are not fixed but ever-changing, because memories do not record the past but are only constructions invented in the present. They are a feat of the imagination. They are made now and last only seconds--flashes, images, evanescent, impermanent, gone. Forever. They are not even words on a page.
”
”
Gregory Martin (Stories for Boys: A Memoir)
“
Well, -beauty that you love so much—is an illusion of the remaining part, the excessive part, which has been consigned to knowledge. It is an illusion of the “other way to bear life” which you mentioned. One could say that in fact there is no such thing as beauty. What makes the illusion so strong, what imparts it with such a power of reality, is precisely knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation. It may be a woman, it may be one's wife, but it's never a consolation. Yet from the marriage between this beautiful thing which is never a consolation, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, something is born, It is as evanescent as a bubble and utterly hopeless. Yet something is born. That something is what people call art!
”
”
Yukio Mishima (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion)
“
Word for word, Galland’s version [of the One Thousand and One Nights] is the worst written, the most fraudulent and the weakest, but it was the most widely read. Readers who grew intimate with it experienced happiness and amazement. Its orientalism, which we now find tame, dazzled the sort of person who inhaled snuff and plotted tragedies in five acts. Twelve exquisite volumes appeared from 1707 to 1717, twelve volumes innumerably read, which passed into many languages, including Hindustani and Arabic. We, mere anachronistic readers of the twentieth century, perceive in these volumes the cloyingly sweet taste of the eighteenth century and not the evanescent oriental aroma that two hundred years ago was their innovation and their glory. No one is to blame for this missed encounter, least of all Galland.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges (Selected Non-Fictions)
“
And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo. “D’ye know where the hands got to?” it asked, vigorous and evanescent at the same time, overcoming the strength of the wind, and swept away from Jukes instantly.
”
”
Joseph Conrad (Joseph Conrad: The Complete Novels)
“
else. They lose self-possession and freedom. The prolific letter-writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton noticed this was happening to him during his college years at Columbia University. Later in life, he wrote: “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3
”
”
Luke Burgis (Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life)
“
The hands of blue time united into the mast of a sailboat. And I was captain on that deck of shadows, at the helm, I, too, a shadow resisting impermanence, asking: Is all or any of it real or am I writing myself into a mystery?
”
”
Maria-Cristina Necula (Evanescent)
“
Commenting acidly on a writer whom I perhaps too naively admired, my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask: 'Wouldn't you say, Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?' This lofty schoolmaster employed my name sarcastically, and stressed the last term as if he meant it to sting, and it rankled even more than he had intended. Later on in life, I found that I still used to mutter and improve my long-meditated reply. Émile Zola—a journalist. Charles Dickens—a journalist. Thomas Paine—another journalist. Mark Twain. Rudyard Kipling. George Orwell—a journalist par excellence. Somewhere in my cortex was the idea to which Orwell himself once gave explicit shape: the idea that 'mere' writing of this sort could aspire to become an art, and that the word 'journalist'—like the ironic modern English usage of the word 'hack'—could lose its association with the trivial and the evanescent.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens
“
Beyond these the flowers were more frequent, but paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream, as though after the dreary stripping of the decorations used in some Watteau festival, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily; of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely care; while, a little farther again, were others, pressed close together in a floating garden-bed, as though pansies had flown out of a garden like butterflies and were hovering with blue and burnished wings over the transparent shadowiness of this watery border; this skiey border also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of a colour more precious, more moving than their own; and both in the afternoon, when it sparkled beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of a happiness silent, restless, and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled like a distant heaven with the roseate dreams of the setting sun, incessantly changing and ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour of the flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and mystery — with a quiet suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7])
“
The similarity between the evanescent greetings of the Duchesse de Lambresac and those of my grandmother’s friends had begun to interest me, by demonstrating that in narrow and enclosed social circles, whether among the petty bourgeoisie or the high nobility, the old ways persist, enabling us to rediscover, like an archaeologist, how people may have been brought up, and the element of soul that it reflects, in the days of the Vicomte d’Arlincourt and Loïsa Puget.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Sodom and Gomorrah)
“
To expect an addict to give up her drug is like asking the average person to imagine living without all her social skills, support networks, emotional stability and sense of physical and psychological comfort. Those are the qualities that, in their illusory and evanescent way, drugs give the addict. People like Serena and Celia and the others whose portraits have appeared in this book perceive their drugs as their “rock and salvation.”
Thus, for all the valid reasons we have for wanting the addict to “just say no,” we first need to offer her something to which she can say “yes.” We must provide an island of relief. We have to demonstrate that esteem, acceptance, love and humane interaction are realities in this world, contrary to what she, the addict, has learned all her life. It is impossible to create that island for people unless they can feel secure that their substance dependency will be satisfied as long as they need it.
”
”
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
Nevertheless, they can go screw themselves and they might just have to because I successfully managed to highjack both their boyfriends. Ha! That’s the comeback! I can totally feel the inter-synaptic high-fives taking place in my brain.
”
”
Addison Moore (Evanescent (The Countenance, #2))
“
Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion, who have any knowledge of human nature, do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude of life? The woman who has only been taught to please, will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-beams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect, that she will try to please other men; and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavour to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover—and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity.
”
”
Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
“
Letters blend to give rise to words Like colors pave way for the birth of million shades! Evanescence reminisces sepia! Memory takes back to black and white! Music pops hot pink! Dance rocks wine red! Marvelous is miraculous as the indigo! Magnificent is magnanimous like Russian red! Splendid is classy like arctic blue! Resplendent inspires like strawberry pink! Flamboyance is flowery like fuchsia! Flawless is perfect like flamingo! Extraordinary stands out like lime yellow! Peculiar is unique like cyan! Pleasant pleases like periwinkle! Soothing soothes like lemonade! Opulent glitters gold! Spectacular shimmers silver! Nice is as mild as dulce de leche! Attractive dazzles onyx! Powerful is headstrong like tangerine! Puissance stupefies like scarlet red! Mellifluence is dissolving, like lavender! Sonorous sounds magenta! Lovely cutely blushes! Sweet is peachy! Richness is wealthy like lush green! Poverty is brown as in flower wilt! Candid is frank as candy red! Altruism is selfless like parmesan! But, BEAUTY IS IRIDESCENT! Which
”
”
Sivaranjini Senthilvel (Poesy passel!: Painted by an 18 year old's word palette...)
“
I've been looking in the mirror for so long.
That I've come to believe my souls on the other side.
Oh the little pieces falling, shatter.
Shards of me,
To sharp to put back together.
To small to matter,
But big enough to cut me into so many little pieces.
If I try to touch her,
And I bleed,
I bleed,
And I breathe,
I breathe no more.
Take a breath and I try to draw from my spirits well.
Yet again you refuse to drink like a stubborn child.
Lie to me,
Convince me that I've been sick forever.
And all of this,
Will make sense when I get better.
I know the difference,
Between myself and my reflection.
I just can't help but to wonder,
Which of us do you love.
So I bleed,
I bleed,
And I breathe,
I breathe now...
Bleed,
I bleed,
And I breathe,
I breathe,
I breathe-
I breathe no more.
”
”
Evanescence (Evanescence -- Anywhere but Home: Piano/Vocal/Chords)
“
But his thoughts were not all dark. Undine's moods still infected him, and when she was happy he felt an answering lightness. Even when her amusements were too primitive to be shared he could enjoy their reflection in her face. Only, as he looked back, he was struck by the evanescence, the lack of substance, in their moments of sympathy, and by the permanent marks left by each breach between them. Yet he still fancied that some day the balance might be reversed, and that as she acquired a finer sense of values the depths in her would find a voice.
”
”
Edith Wharton (The Custom of the Country)
“
living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in its turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew; and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing—but is that true wisdom which is more true than truth, from which the dreamer, waking, says not 'Did I but dream?' but rather says, indicts high heaven's very self with: 'Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?
”
”
William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!)
“
But any picture could deal with the problem of light. The problem with this picture is greater than that of reflective surfaces - it's one of death. You invite a profound theme into your work when you choose cut flowers. You are talking about mortality and time moving forward. You are saying that everything, everything we see and experience and love happens uniquely and happens only once. When you take a picture of a flower in a glass you are, paradoxically, capturing evanescence. You are also showing the indifference of Nature. There is no mourning in a flower photograph, only a shrugging of the shoulders.
”
”
Whitney Otto (Eight Girls Taking Pictures (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series))
“
Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to "keep face" in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the "mendacity" that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience.
”
”
Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)
“
Perfect by nature
Icons of self indulgence
Just what we all need
More lies about a world that
Never was and never will be
Have you no shame don't you see me
You know you've go everybody fooled
Look here she comes now
Bow down and stare in wonder
Oh how we love you
No flaws when you're pretending
But now I know she
Never was and never will be
You don't know how you've betrayed me
And somehow you've got everybody fooled
Without the mask where will you hide
Can't find yourself lost in your lie
I know the truth now
I know who you are
And I don't love you anymore
Never was and never will be
You don't know how you've betrayed me
And somehow you have everybody fooled
It never was and never will be
You're not real and you can't save me
Somehow now you're everybody's fool
”
”
Evanescence
“
Oh scattered band, once my playmates, you few
Who were amidst the gardens here and there in the city,
How hesitantly we located one another, took fancies and
Like the tapestry lamb whose mute words are on a scroll,
Spoke through silence. Our little joys were
Never communicated, - Whose indeed were they?
And among all the passers-by, those hurriers, how it all
Evanesced quite away, weighed down by the torment of the endless year.
Past us were drawn the carriages, wholly indifferent,
Round us the houses stood strong but not real, - and none
Of these were aware of us. What was truly real in it all?
Nothing. Only the balls we tossed, their magnificent arcs,
But certainly not the children. ... Though sometimes one would step
- Alas, one who would soon be lost, - beneath a falling ball.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus)
“
He leaned in closer, and on stepping back, I almost became one with the cupboard, afraid that if he came any closer, I would lose the little control I still possessed.His one arm extended above me, resting against the cupboard door, giving me a good whiff of his bewitching scent. I pinned my hands behind my back, restraining myself against the metal cupboard. As his hand brushed my damp hair back, and then his fingertips trailed down my shoulder – pins and needles gave way to warm and cold waves washing over me. The pins and needles ran down my spine, and then over my entire body. I kept my eyes on his chiseled, eight-pack abs. I struggled to breathe with him so close, virtually on top of me.
He smiled on a whisper. “I just wanted this moment, us together like this, this feeling in my stomach – like I am falling.
”
”
Carlyle Labuschagne
“
Something I'm working on, a possibly helpful spell to cast on yourself in adverse environments... Maybe a self compassion spell that might invite the ancient intelligences in their minute plurality to emerge from the tree line.
I am alright
in the essenceless
stream of becoming
I apprehend myself
actually dancing
with amazing terror
while driving
the shy and alone animal body
itself imagining the breathing
maze of dreaming
mirrors it dreams
itself lost in
No one could be
expected to do this
properly
your body in its
suchness momentarily
in paradise dreaming
up all this
agonic psychic
carnivalia all over
again
"as the words rain down"
like the feathers of birds
of paradise that
heartbreaking
in their naked
individuality
and that incalculably
fine, impossibly
necessary to some
really friendly abyss
you never expected
when you were
that person
sentenced to the futures
your bad moods
subjugated you to
endless hotel hallways
the room numbers
in no order
realizing you will
never find yours again
and that you must
never stop
searching
laughing like an infant
in a bathtub
to enjoy the evanescent
cartoon pandemonium
of awareness while
having kinds of
relationships
We do fine
with our sentience
for the most part.
Thanks anyway.
Void yet appearing
overthinking sometimes.
”
”
Richard Cronshey
“
It is a pity that the beautiful Christian metaphor “salvation” has come to be so hackneyed and therefore so despised. It has been turned into a vapid synonym for “piety”—not even a truly ethical concept. “Salvation” is something far beyond ethical propriety. The word connotes a deep respect for the fundamental metaphysical reality of man. It reflects God’s own infinite concern for man, God’s love and care for man’s inmost being, God’s love for all that is His own in man, His son. It is not only human nature that is “saved” by the divine mercy, but above all the human person. The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable—that which is myself alone. This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called “the world.” And we must be saved above all from that abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self. The person must be rescued from the individual. The free son of God must be saved from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises. To be “lost” is to be left to the arbitrariness and pretenses of the contingent ego, the smoke-self that must inevitably vanish. To be “saved” is to return to one’s inviolate and eternal reality and to live in God.
”
”
Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation)
“
It was then that I made the discovery that his talk created reverberations, that the echo took a long time to reach one's ears. I began to compare it with French talk in which I had been enveloped for so long. The latter seemed more like the play of light on an alabaster vase, something reflective, nimble, dancing, liquid, evanescent, whereas the other, the Katsimbalistic language, was opaque, cloudy, pregnant with resonances which could only be understood long afterwards, when the reverberations announced the collision with thoughts, people, objects located in distant parts of the earth. The Frenchman puts walls about his talk, as he does about his garden: he puts limits about everything in order to feel at home. At bottom he lacks confidence in his fellow-man; he is skeptical because he doesn't believe in the innate goodness of human beings. He has become a realist because it is safe and practical. The Greek, on the other hand, is an adventurer: he is reckless and adaptable, he makes friends easily. The walls which you see in Greece, when they are not of Turkish or Venetian origin, go back to the Cyclopean age. Of my own experience I would say that there is no more direct, approachable, easy man to deal with than the Greek. He becomes a friend immediately: he goes out to you. With the Frenchman friendship is a long and laborious process: it may take a lifetime to make a friend of him. He is best in acquaintanceship where there is little to risk and where there are no aftermaths. The very word ami contains almost nothing of the flavor of friend, as we feel it in English. C'est mon ami cannot be translated by "this is my friend." There is no counterpart to this English phrase in the French language. It is a gap which has never been filled, like the word "home." These things affect conversation. One can converse all right, but it is difficult to have a heart to heart talk.
”
”
Henry Miller (The Colossus of Maroussi)
“
The temple was in a field of graves
suddenly a pitiful-looking skeleton appeared
and said:
A melancholy autumn wind
Blows through the world;
the pampas grass waves
As we drift to the moor,
Drift to the sea.
What can be done
With the mind of a man
That should be clear
But though he is dressed up in a monk's robe,
Just lets life pass him by?
Such deep musings
Made me uneasy, I could not sleep.
Towards dawn
I dozed off...
I found myself surrounded
by a group of skeletons,
acting as they had
when they were
still alive.
One skeleton came over to me and said:
Memories
Flee and
Are no more.
All are empty dreams
Devoid of meaning.
Violate the reality of things
And babble about
'God' and 'the Buddha'
And you will never find
the true Way.
Still breathing,
You feel animated,
So a corpse in a field
Seems to be something
Apart from you.
If chunks of rock
Can serve as a memento
To the dead
A better headstone
Would be a simple tea-mortar.
Humans are indeed frightful things.
A single moon
Bright and clear
In an unclouded sky;
Yet we still stumble
In the world's darkness.
This world
Is but
A fleeting dream
So why be alarmed
At its evanescence?
The vagaries of life,
Though painful,
Teach us
Not to cling
To this floating world.
Why do people
Lavish decoration
On this set of bones,
Destined to disappear
Without a trace?
The original body
Must return to
Its original place.
Do not search
For what cannot be found.
No one really knows
The nature of birth
Nor the true dwelling place.
We return to the source
And turn to dust.
Many paths lead from
The foot of the mountain,
But at the peak
We all gaze at the
Single bright moon.
If at the end of our journey
There is no final
Resting place,
Then we need not fear
Losing our Way.
No beginning.
No end.
Our mind
Is born and dies;
The emptiness of emptiness!
Relax,
And the mind
Runs wild;
Control the world
And you can cast it aside.
Rain, hail, snow, and ice:
All are different
But when they fall
They become to same water
As the valley stream.
The ways of proclaiming
The Mind all vary,
But the same heavenly truth
Can be seen
In each and every one.
Cover your path
With fallen pine needles
So no one will be able
To locate your
True dwelling place.
How vain,
The endless funderals at the
Cremation grounds of Mount Toribe!
Don't the mourner realize
That they will be next?
'Life is fleeeting!'
We think at the sight
Of smoke drifting from Mount Toribe,
But when will we realize
That we are in the same boat?
All is in vain!
This morning,
A healthy friend;
This evening,
A wisp of cremation smoke.
What a pity!
Evening smoke from Mount Toribe
Blown violently
To and fro
By the wind.
When burned
We become ashes,
and earth when buried.
Is it only our sins
That remain behind?
All the sins
Committed
In the Three Worlds
Will fade away
Together with me.
”
”
Ikkyu