Dodie Smith Quotes

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

A night out isn't just chaos and hedonism. It can be beautiful as well and there's a sadness to the end of it.

There's a sadness about love, a melancholy and a sadness about beauty. It's just part of the human experience of living on this planet.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.

All beauty is sad. [...] For it fades.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

But the tune ends too soon for us all

How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.

I envy the dead.

There's a sadness to the human condition that I think music is good for. It gives a counterpoint to the visual beauty, and adds depth to pictures that they wouldn't have if the music wasn't there.

I've cried over string arrangements.

No one wants life to end. It was bad enough when my last tour came to an end.