Quotes & Sayings About Ephemera

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times. — Alan Moore

My workspace is defined by books, ephemera, quiet and light. I don't have a computer, telephone or a fax machine there. — Maira Kalman

He had heard religious people talk about having revelatory experiences. Like there was one moment where everything became clear to them and all the crap and ephemera just floated away. It had always seemed pretty unlikely to him. But the Ed Nicholls had one such moment in a log cabin beside a stretch of water that might have been a lake, or might well have been a canal for all he could tell ... And he realized in that moment that he had to make things right. — Jojo Moyes

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] — John Rogers

The belief that there is a difference between good and bad, meaningful and meaningless, profound and vapid, exciting and banal - this belief was once fundamental to musical education. But it offends against political correctness. Today there is only my taste and yours. The suggestion that my taste is better than yours is elitist, an offence against equality. But unless we teach children to judge, to discriminate, to recognise the difference between music of lasting value and mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education. Judgment is the precondition of true enjoyment, and the prelude to understanding art in all its forms. — Roger Scruton

I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn't mean I don't still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the
adrenaline to the heart. — Anna Quindlen

On the other hand, there is the person in my family, who surprisingly is not me, who keeps nearly every scrap of paper she's ever touched, just in case, just in case the world is ending and everyone has enough food and water but needs ephemera, needs slips of paper, needs old articles and wrapping paper and tax documents and someone else's past to stand in for the past of us all.
I hover somewhere between these two worlds, saving some memories, letting others fritter and slip away. Down one of these paths, it seems to me, the obsessive compulsive holding on and the equally aggressive letting go, lies madness, and even I don't know which one. Culturally and personally both
who can say, which path leads to the better place? — Liz Stephens

I love America for an idea. The reality is important but ambiguous. In Senegal, there stands a building where slaves were stored before they were sent on to the New World. It was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. I love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. It may be an idea not everyone cares for, but it is one I need, I want. I love her for her thought, first, of where you're going, not where you're from; for her majestic optimism against the gray resistances of Europe, most pure in Britain, so that in America I feel like - I am - a sexual being. — Zia Haider Rahman

love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. — Zia Haider Rahman

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them. — Jim Goldberg

We are all living history, and it's hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing's certain, though: if we throw it away, it's gone. — Marilyn Johnson

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera - things like songs and moonlight and kisses - were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.
That was good. — Stephen King

You find a lot of junk when you're searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you'll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you're certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you're hooked for life. — Ransom Riggs

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,
The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.
("Ephemera") — George Sterling

A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter ... No manor woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities. — George Steiner

We [Americans] continue to be harangued by politicians about how Americans must fight this war because we're being attacked because we have freedoms and liberties and women in the workplace and a whole list of ephemera that have nothing to do with this war at all. — Michael Scheuer

Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want. — Robin Nagle

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. — Samuel R. Delany

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary. — Frank Herbert

Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire. — Sarah Monette

While I'm interested in philosophy, I find all the different theories out there somewhat difficult to get a firm grip on. Movies and novels, on the other hand, are easy to understand. So what I like to do is use pop cultural ephemera of all kinds as tools to help me try to understand philosophy. — Douglas Lain

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS. — Rachel Maddow

. . . the bond bubble, the tech bubble, the stock bubble, the emerging markets bubble, the housing bubble. . . One by one they had all burst, and their bursting showed that they had been temporary solutions to long-term problems, maybe evasions of those problems, distractions. With so many bubbles-so many people chasing ephemera, all at the same time-it was clear that things were fundamentally not working. — Peter Thiel

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event. — Fernand Braudel

I take it that a monograph of this sort belongs to the ephemera literature of science. The studied care which is warranted in the treatment of the more slowly moving branches of science would be out of place here. Rather with the pen of a journalist we must attempt to record a momentary phase of current thought, which may at any instant change with kaleidoscopic abruptness. — Gilbert N. Lewis

The wild hetman stood like a statue for a space, dimly grasping something of the cosmic tragedy of the fitful ephemera called mankind and the hooded shapes of darkness which prey upon it. — Robert E. Howard

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear. — Julie Schumacher