Damon

“Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.

To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.”
― Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

“Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.”
― Michael Crichton, Timeline

“How easy to be a bird or an animal, living from day to day, unaware you're alive, unaware that one day you will die.”
― Rachel Ward, Numbers

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver