Momentary Experience Quotes

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

So there's only transcendence in the moment. Nobody can be transcended forever. That's why I say, "Who cares if you're enlightened forever?"

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.

I always look at stuff like 'Mohawk' this way: I don't know if I'll do it again, so I try to really enjoy what I'm doing at that time. So that's what I did on 'Mohawk,' and I don't know if I'll do anything like it again - but I would love to.

The kind of improv that I'm particularly addicted to is the kind that... aims at creating a momentary, fragmentary experience that has a totality to it. It's kind of like fireworks. It's the more ephemeral of art forms - once it's gone, it's gone, baby.

Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

'253' has a little bit of time in it, but basically, everything's happening at once in a small space, and you're exploring the space. 'What happens next?' is not the question that you're asking or answering. It's where do you go, and why should you go there?

My dictum has always been: 'This show is happening just here, just tonight, with these people who are in this hall, and nobody knows what's going to happen until it's done.'

The experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other.

My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

In recent years there's been a lot of philosophical theorising about how important magic is, and how it takes us back to a childlike state of astonishment. I think all this is just nonsense. Magic isn't meaningful or important other than how you're performing it in that moment.