I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.”
Johannes Kepler (epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died), 1630
It is black, indifferent; it sidles away from human utterance. It is too far out in the unbidden world to reach. To desire it is to be humiliated.
Tim Lilburn, Living In The World As If It Were Home, 2002
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 1957
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.
It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds;
it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Anais Nin, The Four Chambered Heart, 1959
As flowing waters disappear into the mist
We lose all track of their passage.
Shih-shu, 1703
A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry, Edited by J. P. Seaton & Dennis Maloney, 1995
And part of the soil is called to wash away
In storms and streams shave close and gnaw the rocks.
Besides, whatever the earth feeds and grows
Is restored to earth. And since she surely is
The womb of all things and their common grave,
Earth must dwindle, you see and take on growth again.
Titus Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, First-century BC