Mary E. Pearson Quotes

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

Already, it is later than you think for your earthly life at best, is only a blink of an eye between two eternities.

The living is not perfect because it is liable to change; the dead is not perfect because it does not live.

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more -- every thing presses on -- whilst thou are twisting that lock, -- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.

I'd be a butterfly; living a rover, Dying when fair things are fading away.

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

The basic rules of life would indicate that it can't last forever, and we'll fall off of the wave and have to climb onto another, but I don't think about it too much. We just keep moving.

There is nothing in the whole world which abides. All things are in a state of ebb and flow, and every shadow passes away. Even time itself, like a river, is constantly gliding away .

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.

Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities.

The things that we have and that we think are so solid - they're like smoke, and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into, nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.