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Transient Quotes

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Transient Quotes

“We are doomed to live the feeling of being lost because temporal beings are doomed to feel this way; this is something that transitory bodies cannot avoid!”

“In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those days for a single performance in Jackson's Century Theatre. Then, as now, my imagination was magnetized toward transient artists - toward the transience as much as the artists. I must have seen "Acrobats in a Park" at the time I wrote the story as exotic, free of any experience as I knew it. At the center of the little story is the Zorro's act: the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that holds together, interlocked, and stands like a wall. Writing about the family act, I was writing about the family itself, its strength as a unit, testing its frailty under stress. I treated it in an artificial and oddly formal way; the stronghold of the family is put on view as a structure built each night; on the night before the story opens, the Wall has come down when the most vulnerable member slips, and the act is done for. But from various points within it and from outside it, I've been writing about the structure of the family in stories and novels ever since. In spite of my uncompromising approach to it, my fundamental story form might have been trying to announce itself to me.”

“Some people ate less food less often when they each had a home than they now do as hobos.”

“There is nothing as powerful to the human psyche as the mental image educed by viewing a magnificent vista. We comprehend the paltriest of our bodies whenever a single person travels across an open desert or an immense prairie, stands on top of a mountain range, walks in the sand in front of a furious sea, or lies on their back and takes in the magnificence of the misty span of the Milky Way. Each act of magnification places us in touch with the finiteness and irrelevance of our trifling personhood. We can only view the broad expanse of the desert and steppe, the sheerness of a mountaintop, the immensity of the sea, and the immeasurable vastness of the galaxy with an overpowering sense of both horror and awe as their grand span transcends human scale. The overpowering physicality of these vistas stands as a testament to their cold indifference to the mortality of humankind. The sheer immensity of nature’s breadth beseeches us to consider the unthinkable: we are transient beings. We are mortal; we are mere sparklers burning fitfully until our spurting light completely fizzles out.”

“O! useful may it be to have shewn, that, though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!And, if the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it—the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.”

“When you make people angry, they act in accordance with their baser instincts, often violently and irrationally. When you inspire people, they act in accordance with their higher instincts, sensibly and rationally. Also, anger is transient, whereas inspiration sometimes has a life-long effect.”

“Our culture is obsessed with youth because we have lost the ancient knowledge that growth never stops. We are not transient, momentary mistakes in the cosmos- evolutionary curiosities that rise like mayflies, swarm for a day, and are gone. We are players who are here to stay, and the universe was built with us in mind. We reflect it, with our deepest loves and loftiest aspirations, just as it reflects us.”

“It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.”

“When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.”