Hal Borland Quotes

All our sweetest hours fly fastest.

Time never stood still for me. It went too fast; that was the bad thing about it!

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

And here you are hurried, And here you are gone; And here is the love, That it's all built upon.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

But where are the snows of yester year?

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?

Lovers come back. Styles come back. But time? It never comes back.

The fact that childhood ends is exactly what makes it so precious - and why you should cherish it while it lasts.

Life is so fast. And I still remember when I came up to the big leagues and played as if it were yesterday. Time flies.

Time is something you can't get back.

It's almost mind-boggling how time flies.

In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.