Anne Bradstreet Quotes

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.

We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor!

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

Time brings all things to pass.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to the ocean and drown. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers!

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

No nation can anticipate its term, nor delay it.

I've become more comfortable as time has gone on with saying goodbye because... I've been having so many conversations about the cyclical nature of life. It just keeps going.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.