Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

Nothing lasts forever but we always try, and I just can't help but wonder why we let it pass us by

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.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

Yet a little while, and (the happy hour) will be over, nor ever more shall we be able to recall it.

But the tune ends too soon for us all

Days of wine and roses laugh and run away, like a child at play.

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?

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.

Neither can the wave that has passed by be recalled, nor the hour which has passed return again.

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.

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.

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

Some very beautiful things get lost and forgotten. Just as I got lost.

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

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.

Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return again.

One moment it was there, another moment it is gone. One moment we are here, and another moment we have gone. And for this simple moment, how much fuss we make! How much violence, ambition, struggle, conflict, anger, hatred, just for this small moment! Just waiting for the train in a waiting room on a station, and creating so much fuss: fighting, hurting each other, trying to possess, trying to boss, trying to dominate - all that politics. And then the train comes and you are gone forever.

Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.

A little while the rose, And after that the thorn; An hour of dewy morn, And then the glamour goes. Ah, love in beauty born, A little while the rose!

Years have passed and how I am anxiously watching the twilight of my childhood, quietly sinking, never to rise again.

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")