“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.”

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

“Then all the charm Is broken--all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other.”

“Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty words to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armor and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit woods where he vanished forever.”

“Maybe that's all real love was--just something that happened quickly and vanished, a kind of gesture to a stranger or a fleeting moment of passion.”

“The excitable observer will pass judgement first and then make knowledge conform to judgement; the prudent observer will first learn to know and then judge according to knowledge.”