“The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.”

“It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same.”

“Every day has been so short, every hour so fleeting, every minute so filled with the life I love that time for me has fled on too swift a wing.”

“That's what's so miraculous about the city: each person's bearing and behavior vanish among these thousand sorts, observations are fleeting, judgements swift, and forgetting inevitable.”

“She smiled like knife on a velvet, she stretched like cat on the sun.”

“MortalityOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,He passes from life to his rest in the grave.The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,Be scattered around, and together be laid;And the young and the old, the low and the high,Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie.Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.'Tis the wink of an eye - 'tis the draught of a breath -From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroudOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”