#passage

Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future. ↗

— George Herbert Mead

#events #experience #future #however #including

I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning. There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes? I know you are unable to imagine this. Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved. ↗

— Meg Rosoff

#death #endings #life #love #passage

Above all, in comedy, and again and again since classical times, passages can be found in which the level of representation is interrupted by references to the spectators or to the fictive nature of the play. ↗

— Paul Watzlawick

#again #classical #comedy #fictive #found

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone. ↗

— Mark Doty

#fluidity #passage #time #world #change

Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#death #life #passage #time #death

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling into a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up, each one a willing receiver for the Thunder-God grooves. To my young ears, the sound of these amplified guitars was angelic (although, with hindsight, I don’t suppose angels play Gibson guitars at ear-bleeding volume). A voice that suggested vocal chords of polished silver soared alongside razor-sharp overdriven riffs. I knew that I was hearing the future. ↗

— Mark Rice

#heavy-metal #mark-rice #metallic-dreams #rite-of-passage #rock-music

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. ↗

— Balthus

#emotions #order #painting #passage #possible

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. ↗

— Mortimer Adler

#already #any #ask #book #cannot

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#belief #institutions #into #passage #power

As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through. ↗

— Otto Dix

#after #afterwards #along #badly #could