Moment

"Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else."

"We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay."

"The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end."

"As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist."

"Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank."

"The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wallOf heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. <!-- We reason about them with a later reason."

"I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door."

"The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary . . . What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact..."

"In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace."

"Oh, if life were made of moments, Even now and then a bad one! But if life were only moments, Then you'd never know you had one."

"I used to think I had the answers to everything But now I know Life doesn't always Go my way, yeah Feels like I'm caught in the middle That's when I realize I'm not a girl Not yet a woman All I need is time A moment that is mine While I'm in between"

"When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning."

"There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment. Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

"It must be obvious... that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity."

"Manchmal gibt es im Leben Momente von außergewöhnlicher Intensität, in denen man deutlich den Eindruck hat, sein Schicksal herauszufordern."

"In den Momenten stärkster geistiger Anspannung sieht der Mensch keineswegs geistreich, vielmehr schafsdumm aus."

"Ich habe keine Angst vor der Stille. Die Oper hat Momente, in denen Stille die schönste Musik ist."

"Der edle Mensch kann sich in Momenten vernachlässigen, der vornehme nie."