Kent Haruf Quotes

The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.

Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

Today is the only guarantee you get.

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.

I don't know what I'm going to be doing in two years or even in two weeks. I have to live for today.

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.

Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

I know I'm just one man trying to do one thing, and the next day is not promised to any man. I'm very humble.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

Death is inevitable, but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

They've asked me to do this temporarily. I don't know what temporarily means. Life is temporary.

I can't take one day for granted. That's usually how I think.

I was brought up to appreciate the here and now, and, knowing this is your only life, to view death as an inevitable and reassuring end.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

You want to know the secret of life? It is to breathe in and out. And the mystery of life? You never know when it is going to end.

For me, how I live every day is with the kind of mentality that you're never, ever guaranteed tomorrow.

Nothing lasts forever in my profession.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.