Sally Mann Quotes

How small a part of time they share, That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

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.

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")

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

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.

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

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

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.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no! alas, time stays, we go.

But where are the snows of yester year?

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

You - I don't think anybody ever forgets the first person they fell in love with. That's something that everybody remembers, and it doesn't matter what the time period is or where; I mean, those feelings are always the same.

Love doesn't last.

We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.

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

There's a sadness about love, a melancholy and a sadness about beauty. It's just part of the human experience of living on this planet.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

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

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.