Fading World Quotes & Sayings
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Because civilization isn't a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, recreated daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible. And if he wishes to live, he must do what he can to prevent the world he wants to live in from fading away. As long as there's war, life is a preventative measure. — Steven Galloway

Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall ... And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn't mean very much. — Haruki Murakami

In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing. — Tadatoshi Akiba

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it. — Elie Wiesel

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. — George Orwell

She smiles, lightning quick, then squeezes my hand harder, holding on like she's afraid someone will come and pull us apart.
"You'll face it all with me?" The world narrows, the sounds of the oncoming search party fading, the lights blurring around us until it's just her and me, our breath condensing and mingling in the cold air. She's stolen my voice, this girl in my arms, and for a moment I can't answer. I have to gather my wits, try to remember how to breathe.
"Always." Her smile is like the sun coming out.
"Then you ought to kiss me while you can, Major Merendsen. It may be a while before your next opportunity. — Amie Kaufman

At last, Lady Evenstar, fairest in this world, and most beloved, my world is fading. Lo! we have gathered, and we have spent, and now the time of payment draws near."
'Arwen knew well what he intended, and long had foreseen it; nonetheless she was overborne by her grief. "Would you then, lord, before your time leave your people that live by your word?" she said. — J.R.R. Tolkien

And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think ... Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. — Samuel Beckett

If you pour everything you have into this life, this world, which is temporary and fading, you're jeopardizing your relationship with God, the only thing that's eternal. — Craig Groeschel

The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance. — Donald Barthelme

They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. — Diane Setterfield

It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We've spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it - scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.
And what of the rest of the world that's already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star's just dying and we'll never know about it. Somewhere another's being born whose light we'll never see.
The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothing ness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything-all of us-will simply cease to be. — Carrie Ryan

Why would we spend our lives being amused by the dim hue of the television when we could be breathlessly enraptured in the blazing brilliance of Christ's glory? Let us keep our eyes on Christ, the Author and Perfecter of the faith. In so doing, we will have little appetite for the fading illusions of this passing world. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

He looked ... very alone then, a single human in a monster-infested world, a fading bright spot surrounded by shadow. And despite my best intentions, my determination not to be a monster, I was part of the world that he feared. Part of the darkness that would drag him down and tear him apart.
I'm sorry Zeke — Julie Kagawa

Deceiving world, that with alluring toysHast made my life the subject of thy scorn,And scornest now to lend thy fading joys,T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn;How well are they that die ere they be born,And never see thy sleights, which few men shunTill unawares they helpless are undone! — Robert Greene

The fading dawn colors revive momentarily, and the sky shines with lilac and daffodil, layering colors in clouds like quilts stacked on a bed. More birds chime into the morning air: a nuthatch's nasal onk joins the crow's croak and a black-throated green warbler's murmur from the branches above the mandala. As the colors finally fade under the fierce gaze of their mother, the sun, a wood thrush caps the dawn chorus with his astounding song. The song seems to pierce through from another world, carrying with it clarity and ease, purifying me for a few moments with its grace. Then the song is gone, the veil closes, and I am left with embers of memory. — David George Haskell

Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore. — George R R Martin

He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory. — Cormac McCarthy

The night was fading. It was too early to be called dawn yet, but Taylor could just make out the outline of Will's weary, unshaven face. His deep blue eyes were the only color in the gray world of rain and shadows.
Will leaned in, and his mouth covered Taylor's, rough but sweet, his tongue seeking Taylor's. Taylor opened willingly to that kiss, forgetting for a second his scratched, scraped hands and the rain running down the back of his neck. They kissed a lot these days, especially for men who had never been much for kissing. Taylor had become expert in all Will's kisses, from the hungry, lustful kisses that always made his own cock rise so fast it hurt, to the tender, almost cherishing kisses that Will generally saved for when he thought Taylor was sleeping. That dawn kiss beneath the pine trees rippled through him like an electric shock, a reminder that, tired, wet, and lost as they might be, so long as they were together, they were all right. — Josh Lanyon

There was a brief moment of weightlesssness: a balancing point between air and earth, dirt and heaven. How strange, I thought, how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion. But as often happens in that time between existing in the world and fading into dreams, this moment over the edge ended with the ruthless jerk back to awareness. — Andrew Davidson

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other. — James Joyce

Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time - a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence - and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period ... what can I say? I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world. — Alain-Fournier

I have lain awake in the darkness many nights
Thinking of poems, going to sleep on poems,
Finally,with the darkness closing on
The bright remembered words. I have thought of the darkness
Closing on the world, the words of the poems forgotten,
All the great beautiful words of the poems
Fading from the mind of the world, let go
Slowly, unknowingly, as from the mind
Of one diseased the light of man's endeavor
Fades to the idiot darkness and is lost.
Part of the darkness, I have lain awake
Watching the poems of the world fade out like stars. — Charles E. Butler

In a world where there were no specifically mental facts, is it not plain that there would be a complete impartiality, an evenly diffused light, not the central illumination fading away into outer darkness, which is characteristic of objects in relation to a mind? — Bertrand Russell

Staring at the world through the bottom of a glass, all I see is a man who's fading fast. — Merle Haggard

Death may be peaceful but the circumstances leading to it are more often than not anything but. They slept that day with their eyes open, with death as the companion of their dreams. Maybe you would like to imagine that they were looking at each other, heads twisted at grotesque angles or at the fading sun.
Their bodies were just empty vessels and their eyes were windows that showed only a vacant home. Maybe it was because they had passed on into a world where the sun never set or maybe even a world where nothing existed but an infinite pool of darkness. You can choose to believe anything you want up to the time Death comes for you. After that, well, we can only imagin — Shitij Sharma

Lines of light ran up towering structures, fading into the stars. The world felt vast, as if anything could get lost in it. — Cory Michael Sheldon

she was the kind of woman
who only gave herself away in small doses,
leaving men wandering like little children
at all that she was.
she tortured them with the sound
of her fading footsteps,
each one an exclamation mark
to a sentence the world tragically
instilled in her long ago
"find something beautiful, then
let it go. — Christopher Poindexter

Are you prepared to follow the Lamb whithersoever? The Lord does as He chooses. He dispenses miracles as He chooses for His own glorious purposes. He doesn't always give us what we asked for. He doesn't always give that healing and even when He does we still become sick and die eventually. Do we trust in His sovereign choices or trust only in getting what we want? Will we fix our eyes on the storm in this fading world or on the Christ of heaven? — David Holdsworth

It didn't make me glow. I felt more like I was fading away, like the world had forgotten me. — Lucy Christopher

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person. — Han Kang

When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone. — Chuck Klosterman

I look at the world and through these innocent eyes, all I see is hatred and anger. Corrupting everything, ruining everything, but not preserving anything. What I should be seeing is respect, acceptance and love. But, if that was what these innocent eyes witnessed, they would be seeing and observing a lie. The people in this world are not respectful, theres barely any acceptance in this day and age, and love is an almost silent whisper, slowly fading. These innocent eyes, are now corrupted. No longer innocent as they should be. — Kitauna Roberts

The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted. — Jan Peter Balkenende

The music and applause fast fading from his ears, Bruce would lay down his guitar, grit his teeth, and walk dutifuly back into his father's charred vision of the world. — Peter Ames Carlin

He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world outside. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the man sleeping. — Samuel Beckett

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. — James Joyce

And yet there are other days, when I'm downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar's dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: "A Stronger Loving World." To the only panel he's circled. Oscar - who never defaced a book in his life - circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeded in "saving the world." Veidt says: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: "In — Junot Diaz

As the earth dies your spirit will bloom; as the world fades your soul will rise and glisten. Amongst the dehydrated crevices of a desert earth you will stumble upon your diamonds; in between the dry skulls and cracked bones you will find your sapphires. — C. JoyBell C.

Thinking about My Purpose POINT TO PONDER: There is more to life than just here and now. VERSE TO REMEMBER: "This world is fading away, along with everything it craves. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever." 1 JOHN 2:17 (NLT) QUESTION TO CONSIDER: Since I was made to last forever, what is the one thing I should stop doing and the one thing I should start doing today? — Rick Warren

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them. — Donna Tartt

It seems like such a long time ago when I thought the world of him. He was some exotic planet and I was his favorite satellite. But he's no planet, just the final fading light of an already dead star.
And I'm not a satellite. I'm space junk, hurtling as far as I can away from him. — Nicola Yoon

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call. — A.K. Kuykendall

Beauty was worth
Its every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending,
As darkness covered the garden that is the earth. — Hayden Carruth

With Clinton, of course, the term "world stage" was peculiarly literal: he had a fading vaudevillian's desperation to be loved. — Mark Steyn

Compassion is the feeling of sympathy which the pain of one being awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned they are to re-echo the note of suffering, which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart, bringing all creatures a proof of their kinship in the universal God. And as for man, whose function it is to show respect and love for God's universe and all its creatures, his heart has been created so tender that it feels with the whole organic world ... mourning even for fading flowers; so that, if nothing else, the very nature of his heart must teach him that he is required above everything to fe the brother of all beings, and to recognize the claim of all beings to his love and his beneficence.
Horeb, Chapter 17, Verse 125 — Pirkei Avot

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he'd been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed. — Denis Johnson

All my life, I [Pari] have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath. — Khaled Hosseini

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. — Walker Percy

During the first and primitive stages of the history of our species there was a general centrifugal movement of peoples into distance, to all sides, with the various populations becoming increasingly separated, each developing its own applications and associated interpretations of the shared universal motifs; whereas, since we are all now being brought together again in this mighty present period of world transport and communication, those differences are fading. The old differences separating one system from another now are becoming less and less important, less and less easy to define. And what, on the contrary, is becoming more and more important is that we should learn to see through all the differences to the common themes that have been there all the while, that came into being with the first emergence of ancestral man from the animal levels of existence, and are with us still. — Joseph Campbell

Now, he thought, since all these most easily perishing things have slipped from me again, now I'm standing here under the sun again just as I have been standing here a little child, nothing is mine, I have no abilities, there is nothing I could bring about, I have learned nothing. How wondrous is this! Now, that I'm no longer young, that my hair is already half gray, that my strength is fading, now I'm starting again at the beginning and as a child! Again, he had to smile. Yes, his fate had been strange! Things were going downhill with him, and now he was again facing the world void and naked and stupid. But he could not feel sad about this, no, he even felt a great urge to laugh, to laugh about himself, to laugh about this strange, foolish world. — Hermann Hesse

High Pasture
Come up
come up: in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not
but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.
And to that height illumined of the mind
he calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day. — Edith Wharton

lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Ironically, the memory of the women heroes of World War I was largely eclipsed by the very women they had inspired. The more blatant evil enacted into law by Nazi Germany during the Second World War ensured that those who fought against it would continue to fascinate long after the first war had become a vague, unpleasant memory - one brought to mind only by fading photographs of serious, helmeted young men standing in sandbagged trenches or smiling young women in ankle-length nursing uniforms, or by the presence of poppies in Remembrance Day ceremonies. — Kathryn J. Atwood

We're just doing our best to live in this world, Davy." Sean's voice stretches into the fading dark. "We're not perfect, but we're not monsters, either. We're just human. — Sophie Jordan

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves. — Haruki Murakami

If you don't connect yourself to your family and to the world in some fashion, through your job or whatever it is you do, you feel like you're disappearing, you feel like you're fading away, you know? I felt like that for a very very long time. Growing up, I felt like that a lot. I was just invisible; an invisible person. I think that feeling, wherever it appears, and I grew up around people who felt that way, it's an enormous source of pain; the struggle to make yourself felt and visible. To have some impact, and to create meaning for yourself, and for the people you come in touch with. — Bruce Springsteen

So she told me a story. A story about a boy who was born with very green eyes, and the man who was so captivated by their color that he searched the world for a stone in exactly the same shade." His voice is fading now, falling into whispers so quiet I can hardly hear him. "She said the boy was me. That this ring was made from that very same stone, and that the man had given it to her, hoping one day she'd be able to give it to me. It was his gift, she said, for my birthday." He stops. Breathes. "And then she took it off, slipped it on my index finger, and said, 'If you hide your heart, he will never be able to take it from you'. — Tahereh Mafi

Just say it, she thought. Say what everyone in this bunker is thinking. Say what we all know to be true. The truth that we are all going to die down here, and death is the end. Nobody wakes up to a heaven or paradise. Your life will be gone. You will be gone. Forever. Uncover the truth. Tear off the bandages of delusion. Open your hearts and minds to the real world. We were doomed the day we were born. We lived and we will die and the only immortals are the people who did something worth remembering while they lived. My genetics are prime. I am pleasing to the eyes of man and machine. A dripping fountain of pleasure. Their organic sanctuary. And in time? Aging. Fading. Graying. What am I? Who am I? What makes me human? Emotions? My conscience? The soul is an old testament myth. No one shall ascend anywhere except into annihilation. The dust of earth and stars are the only eternals, she said. — C.J. Anderson

She was wary, trained to expect little of life, grateful for small pleasures, on her guard against promises, accustomed to making the best of things, in the habit of both wanting and not daring to want something more. Now Miracle Polish has come along, with its air of swagger and its taunting little whisper. Why not? it seemed to say. Why on earth not? But the mirrors that strengthened me, that filled me with new life, made Monica bristle. Did she feel that I preferred a false version of her, a glittering version, to the flesh-and-blood Monica with her Band-Aids and big knees and her burden of sorrows? What drew me was exactly the opposite. In the shining mirrors I saw the true Monica, the hidden Monica, the Monica buried beneath years of discouragement. Far from escaping into a world of polished illusions, I was able to see, in the depths of those mirrors, the world no longer darkened by diminishing hopes and fading dreams. There, all was clear, all was possible. — Steven Millhauser

Be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and the night alone, though that is what we do and memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends. — Andrew O'Hagan

And therefore the idea of serving mankind, of the brotherhood and oneness of people, is fading more and more in the world, and indeed the idea now even meets with mockery, for how can one drop one's habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented? He is isolated, and what does he care about the whole? They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within ... could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Savior, if of Zion's city I through grace a member am; Let the world deride or pity, I will glory in thy name Fading is the worldling's pleasure, All his boasted pomp and show; Solid joys and lasting treasure, None but Zion's children know. — John Newton

The old doctrine that God wanted man to do something for him, and that he kept a watchful eye upon all the children of men; that he rewarded the virtuous and punished the wicked, is gradually fading from the mind. We know that some of the worst men have what the world calls success. We know that some of the best men lie upon the straw of failure. We know that honesty goes hungry, while larceny sits at the banquet. We know that the vicious have every physical comfort, while the virtuous are often clad in rags. — Robert Green Ingersoll

I threw myself at his feet, weeping, and told him of the ghosts I saw, the thousands upon thousands fading in the wind, souls trapped in sugarcane trees and sweet grains transported across the world. I tallied them against the souls of the living, trapped by the laws of men which enmesh them further, and the helplessness of the Emperor's reach. I doubted I could have brought my brother home alive, and the spirits I had to leave behind weighed heavy on my conscience. — Jessi Cole Jackson

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors. — Andrew Solomon

Regard this fleeting world like this:
Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn,
like bubbles on a fast-moving stream,
like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass,
like a candle flickering in a strong wind ...
echoes, mirages, and phantoms, hallucinations,
and like a dream. — Gautama Buddha

between the word and the world lie
fading eternities of soon — Laura Riding

My world had been fading to gray until she burst in like a bombshell of color and light... — Emma Scott