Edith Wharton Quotes

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

All things fade and quickly turn to myth.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

How soon will time cover all things.

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten when their noblest and most enduring works decay?

History is a great dust heap.

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

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.

It's quite sad to see how many people I've known over that years that just die off, you know like wilted flowers. Well, there's something to be said for flowers in the dustbin.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Time is the devourer of all things.

People will forget me pretty quick.

We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.