fleetingly QUOTES

1 " I am prone to envy. It is one of my three default emotions, the others being greed and rage. I have also experienced compassion and generosity, but only fleetingly and usually while drunk, so I have little memory. "

― Augusten Burroughs

2 " Take fireflies for example. Try to imagine their beauty, the evanescent beauty of their lives, which don't even last a week.

Female fireflies flash their lights only to have intercourse with the males; males twinkle just to have intercourse with the females. And once their mating has finished, they die. In short, their reproductive instinct is the single, absolute reason for fireflies to live. In that simple instinct and their simple world, no kind of sadness can intervene. This is precisely why fireflies are so fleetingly beautiful. "

― Tatsuhiko Takimoto , Welcome to the N.H.K.

3 " Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all. "

― Albert Camus , Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

4 " He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks.... "

― , The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike, #2)

5 " I thought fleetingly of Anne, how the faces changed but the act was always the same, the need was always the same, no one drew a line between the sex you bought and the love you made, and your body could not tell the difference. "

― Miles Watson , Cage Life

6 " Although only three legs would obey him, the white wolf began to run. Run, to outpace the agony that could rip and tear a human heart. Run, to outdistance the human grief that could not be borne. Run, to be as the moon, a swift white shape gleaming in the night. Run, to be a wolf and only a wolf.

As he raced away into the welcoming arms of the night, James was only fleetingly aware that he had just buried his human self alongside Evelyn.

And then he was aware of nothing. "

― Dani Harper

7 " There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight. "

― Cassandra Clare , Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader

8 " Even though Xavier was only human, it seemed he could protect me from anything and everything. I wouldn't have been worried if a fire-breathing dragon had torn of the roof, because I knew that Xavier was there. I wondered fleetingly if I was expecting to much og him, but dismissed the idea. "

9 " you are
as fleetingly beautiful

as a mother’s tears
and a father’s pranks

a brother’s bachelorhood
and a best friend’s bad mood

a bride’s glittering jitters
and a handsome stranger’s smile. "

― Sanober Khan , Turquoise Silence

10 " It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer.

'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?'

'Let them die,' he repeated.

I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby.

'Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except . . . this . . .'

He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky. "

― Colette , The Pure and the Impure

11 " He was big, that Sid. He was a force, a character, and I wondered fleetingly if Sally and I would ever seem as big to our offspring as Sid had seemed to us. "

― , Best Friends

12 " But illness does not always write itself upon the body, the sickness I search for is hidden deep within the brain. Sometimes it rises to the surface. Sometimes the face betrays what the body conceals. But there moments, these betrayals, last no longer than an instant. They come, they go, they pass over the patient, darkening and brightening his face like clouds gusting over a meadow. How is it possible, then, to tell what he is suffering when the visible signs of his inner disorder appear so fleetingly upon his face? "

― Sarah Shun-lien Bynum , Madeleine Is Sleeping

13 " Happiness comes fleetingly now and then To those who have learned to do without it And to them only. "

14 " Happiness comes fleetingly now and then to those who have learned to do without it and to them only. "

15 " The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events. "

― Joyce Carol Oates , A Widow's Story