Billy Joel Quotes

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

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

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")

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.

Not to hope for things to last forever, is what the year teaches and even the hour which snatches a nice day away.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

But where are the snows of yester year?

No one wants life to end. It was bad enough when my last tour came to an end.

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.

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

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

What we have never had, remains; It is the things we have that go.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

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.

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

If I close my eyes forever will it all remain unchanged?