Grasp The Moment Quotes & Sayings

It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day. — Rinker Buck

Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough? — Richard Paul Evans

Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.
What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it. — Eugene Ionesco

If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err. — William James

Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment they think they have grasped it ... the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown or sufficiently near to be enjoyed. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can. — Anne Carson

The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years - in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it. — George MacDonald

I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can't start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn't say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is. — Anne Carson

I love reading. It has taught me many things. I have learned how to bridge the gap between both genders and age. Separation anxiety and psychoanalysing myself. Between youth and adulthood. It takes a lifetime for some people to fully grasp how wonderful it is just to accept the friendship of someone who is older than you or younger than you. You will always learn something new and that is always how the game of life is played. You do not have to be an intellectual to realise that this moment in time for any generation you will always be caught between pitching your tent, finding that perfect picnic spot, realising that you are perpetually caught between being the frosting on top of the cake and the Everest. — Abigail George

To grasp the essence of chirality, it is instructive to withdraw for a moment from the familiar three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one, into a plane, and enquire what chirality means there. — Vladimir Prelog

We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline — Peter Berger

Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock, among objects close at hand and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the traveller, and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly with him: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death! — Charles Dickens

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life. — Andrei Tarkovsky

The world was full of beauty.
She wanted to grab hold of it and take it down into her bones. Yet always it seemed beyond her grasp. Sometimes only by a little, like now. The thinnest membrane.
Usually, though, by miles.
She couldn't expect to be that kind of happy all the time. She knew that.
But sometimes you could. Sometimes you should be allowed a tiny bit of joy that should stay with you for more than five minutes. That wasn't too much to ask. To have a moment like this, and be able to hold on to it.
To cross that membrane, and feel alive. — Sara Zarr

But out of all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices. — Hermann Hesse

And he thought then about the Guild - the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword ... and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they'd existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died. — Frank Herbert

You must first realize the thing completely in your mind. Then grasp the brush, fix your attention so that you see clearly what you wish to paint; start quickly, move the brush, follow straight what you see before you, as the buzzard swoops down when the hare jumps out. If you hesitate one moment, it is gone. — Morris Graves

He knew it would come, and soon, maybe even this 12:07. The moment she would slip from his grasp, no matter how tightly he held on. — Patrick Ness

Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise for them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds. — Isaac Asimov

It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places. — Henri Poincare

I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come. — Jonathan Littell

Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It would be one of the great tragedies of history if at the very moment of the victory, now within our grasp, such distrust, such lack of faith, should prejudice the entire undertaking after the colossal losses of life, material and treasure. Churchill — David McCullough

For one brief moment victory was within our grasp!"
"And then the game started! — Charles M. Schulz

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. — William James

Sometimes you only have a fleeting moment in time to grasp an opportunity, as fate may never again line up a set of circumstances in the same way. — C.E. Graham

For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a very precious gift that we have lost. — Peter Matthiessen

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place. — Boris Pasternak

One understands then why woman has no sexual parts, properly speaking. It is because she is herself a sexual part - a sexual part of man, to cumbersome for him to carry around permanently and therefore deposited outside himself for most of the time and taken up when needed. Moreover the quality that distinguishes man from animals is this very power of equipping himself at any moment with an instrument, tool or arm that he needs, but that he can get rid of straight away, whereas the lobster has to drag his two pincers about with him everywhere. And just as mans hand is a sort of grappling hook that enables him to grasp a hammer, sword or fountain pen according to his needs, so his sex is the sort of grappling hook of the sexual parts rather than the sexual part itslef. — Michel Tournier

I lowered my hands to try to save from disorder the arrangement of the tleaves and flowers; meanwhile, she was also dealing with the branches, leaning forward; and so it happened that at the very moment when one of my hands slipped in confusion between Madame Miyagi's kimono and her bare skin and found itself clasping a soft and warm breast, elongated in form, one of the lady's hands, from among the branches keiyaki [translator's note: in Europe called Caucasian elm], had reached my member and was holding it in a firm, frank grasp, drawing it from my garments as if she were performing the operation of stripping away leaves. — Italo Calvino

Now's my chance. I grab the collar of his shirt and pull him down so I can reach. As soon as our lips touch, his hands gently grasp the sides of my face, holding me close.
Pulling away slowly, Kristian gazes down at me, the dim light around the shadowed room glinting in his dark eyes. This moment is perfect. One I will remember forever. Kristian's fingers run down the side of my face, I smile up at him and he returns it. — Dannielle Wicks

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. — Peter Hoeg

She did not respond, only clung harder to my embrace, and I held her with all the afflictions of a man torn by love. What a miracle she was, what a truly exquisite paragon of beauty and virtue so incredibly combined. And all perhaps wrenched from my grasp because of a war I had no real interest in nor knowledge of. In that moment I did not care who won, if only it would end and I could be with her. I would accept the whole responsibility of defeat if I had to, if only it meant a life with her by my side.
I just wanted her. Needed her. As simply and clearly as one needs food and oxygen and light, I needed her in my life.
And above us, flittering tranquilly in the trees above, the finches and skylarks continued to sing peacefully into the fading sun. — Jamie L. Harding

Sculpture does not reject resemblance, of which, indeed, it has need. But resemblance is not its first aim.
What it is looking for, in its periods of greatness, is the gesture, the expression, or the empty stare which
will sum up all the gestures and all the stares in the world. Its purpose is not to imitate, but to stylize and
to imprison in one significant expression the fleeting ecstasy of the body or the infinite variety of human
attitudes. Then, and only then, does it erect, on the pediments of teeming cities, the model, the type, the
motionless perfection that will cool, for one moment, the fevered brow of man. The frustrated lover of
love can finally gaze at the Greek caryatides and grasp what it is that triumphs, in the body and face of the
woman, over every degradation — Albert Camus

But the knowledge and love of our Divine Redeemer, of which we were the object from the first moment of His Incarnation, exceed all that the human intellect can hope to grasp. For hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love — Pope Pius XII

The goal of becoming a better person is within the reach of us all, at every moment. ... We need only invoke the power of mindful awareness in any action of body, speech, or mind to elevate that action from the unconscious reflex of a trained creature to the awakened choice of a human being who is guided to a higher life by wisdom. ... We may not "complete" the work in this lifetime and root out the very mechanism by which our minds and bodies manifest their hereditary karmic toxins. Yet to whatever extent we can notice them as they arise, understand them for what they are, and gently abandon our grasp of them - if only for this moment - we are gaining ground in the grand scheme of things. And even a modest moment of emancipation from the unwholesome roots of greed, hatred, and delusion is a moment without suffering. — Andrew Olendzki

Of the many strange things Einstein's work revealed, the fluidity of time is the hardest to grasp. Whereas everyday experience convinces us that there is an objective concept of time's passage, relativity shows this to be an artifact of life at slow speeds and weak gravity. Move near light speed, or immerse yourself in a powerful gravitational field, and the familiar, universal conception of time will evaporate. If you're rushing past me, things I insist happened at the same moment will appear to you to have occurred at different moments. If you're hanging out near the edge of a black hole, an hour's passage on your watch will be monumentally longer on mine. — Brian Greene

The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. — C.S. Lewis

If the way to the center were easy to find - if it were capable of being captured in doctrines or were subject to human control - it would not be the genuine way. If the path that opens the heart and the mind could be found by simple belief, all the true believers would be opening the doors and windows of their hearts with gestures of true compassion. They would readily understand the common threads in the words "Jesus was right," "Moses led me along," and "Mohammed opened doors in my heart." When the great way opens even for a moment the path between mind and heart widens. The heart begins to find the thought of unity buried within it and the mind begins to see subtleties that were impossible to grasp just a minute before. Finding the great way requires a willingness to surrender again and again, not simply a zeal for bowing one's head in the same old way. — Michael Meade

Try to recall the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and try to grasp and appreciate the high quality of lunacy required for you to have ever thought you were that person. — Padgett Powell

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control. — Jack Henry Abbott

Used is to sued, as brick is to Kricb, and that is such a profound observation on my part that I'm afraid I don't fully grasp it at the moment. — Jarod Kintz

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up. — Michelangelo Antonioni

Man operates in chronos, or measured time; God operates in kairos - an opportune or supreme moment. The determination of when kairos moments take place is in accordance with God's sovereignty, and is far beyond our human grasp of understanding or control. However, God's timing is always perfect and our submission to His timing is critical to our personal peace. — Teresa Hairston

Katrina held Bram in her arms, speaking softly, reassuringly, as they approached baby Modoc.
This was an important moment, a beginning, for she knew the boy would spend his life with animals, especially elephants, and the meeting was of utmost importance. Neither the elephant nor the baby said a word. All was quiet as they looked at each other. Mo's small trunk wormed its way up, reaching to the baby. As Bram leaned over, his little hand pulled loose from Katrina's grasp found its way down toward the trunk. A finger extended to meet the tip of the trunk. Bram's expression was one of curiosity; he felt the wet tip, Modoc moved her "finger" all around Bram's hand, sliding it across each finger and the palm. A big tickle grin spread across Bram's face, Modoc did her elephant "chirp," a tear glistened as it ran down Katrina's face. All was well. The future had been written. — Ralph Helfer

If the Greeks had left no tragedies behind for us, the highest reach of their power would be unknown. The three poets who were able to sound the depths of human agony were able also to recognize and reveal it as tragedy. The mystery of evil, they said, curtains that of which "every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions." Pain could exalt and in tragedy for a moment men could have sight of a meaning beyond their grasp. "Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness," Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in her extremity, "we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows." Why is the death of the ordinary man — Edith Hamilton

But of all the water's secrets, he saw today only a single one-one that struck his soul. He saw that this water flowed and flowed, it was constantly flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always eternally the same and yet new at every moment! Oh, to be able to grasp this, to understand this! — Hermann Hesse

To travel is to be born and to die at every instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse; we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing; each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows. — Victor Hugo

Through repeated practice of the body scan over time, we come to grasp the reality of our body as whole in the present moment. This feeling of wholeness can be experienced no matter what is wrong with your body. One part of your body, or many parts of your body, may be diseased or in pain or even missing, yet you can still cradle them in this experience of wholeness. - Jon Kabat — Howard Zinn

He felt he was about to experience again some ancient, delicious childhood moment that the steam calliope's sour hollowness, the stitching hurdy-gurdy accompaniment, and the drum-and-cymbal crash brought almost to the margin of his grasp. — Patricia Highsmith

The Elizabethan Failure may engage in battle, but the blow that fells him will most likely be an accidental one. And the cup of water so gallantly offered will, at the last moment, slip from his weak grasp, thus rendering two people thirsty instead of one. — Naomi Neale

At the root of this new feeling was the realization that he was going to die--but not today. I'm going to die. When you first grasp that concept as a child, it seems like a revelation that is both monumental and entirely irrelevant, like the fact that there are millions of stars like our sun scattered through the universe. As you move through your life, you say the words to yourself with varying degrees of conviction. When a car runs a red light and misses you by inches in an intersection, you say it and you mean it for a moment. — Reece Hirsch

Our culture sends some amazingly contradictory messages about what an ideal mother is like. Mothers try to live up to these ideals without recognizing the contradictions or the improbability of the task. As mothers, you are often expected to have a fulfilling career, time for personal interests, a rewarding marriage, involvement in your communities, a thorough grasp of current events - and be able to provide baked goods at a moment's notice. — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

I cant take it like this much longer, Milt," Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
"I cant take it much longer," she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect [ ... ] That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they
just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, as if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? — James Jones

haiku moment: that moment of absolute intensity when the poet's grasp of his intuition is complete, so that the image lives its own life. Such — Kenneth Yasuda

I don't think in the past. I don't think in the future. You grasp the moment. — Eli Manning

Now is the time to take up the cause of the advancement of human rights for all and the moment is yours to grasp. — Romeo Dallaire

While everyone adjusted themselves and their packs, Donna sniffed curiously at Louie's nose. Her attitude suggested she might want to make friends with the giant dog; Lou couldn't resist the temptation. Once Donna lured Louie in, she slowly, cautiously, turned about to align her hooves with Louie's head. Perhaps she didn't like dogs. Perhaps she didn't want a rival for Monty's attentions. Perhaps she was merely an impish tarkus much like the Dane himself. Cody watched as the Dane failed to grasp the gravity of his predicament. At the last moment, Cody smacked Louie's hind end, scuttling the devious donkey's murderous trap. — Map Whitman

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever. — Jane Smiley

God is light, we are told, and Hell is outer darkness. But look at a desert mountain stripped bare by the sun, and you learn only geography. Watch darkness claim it, and for a moment you may grasp why God had to create Satan - or man to create both. — Colin Fletcher

For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you're conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule. — Rolf Potts

We were decadent in our intimacy. Leaving no inch of skin untouched lest a moment of rapture slip through our grasp. Thrusting and plunging, in dazed euphoria, the exquisite cravings for those carnal delights ravaged our souls until shamelessly, gasping lust tainted air, we discovered insatiability... — Virginia Alison

The present moment is always full of infinite treasure. It contains far more than you can possibly grasp. Faith is the measure of its riches: what you find in the present moment is according to the measure of your faith. Love also is the measure: the more the heart loves, the more it rejoices in what God provides. The will of God presents itself at each moment like an immense ocean that the desire of your heart cannot empty; yet you will drink from that ocean according to your faith and love. — Jean-Pierre De Caussade

Beginning today, I will create a new future by creating a new me. No longer will I dwell in a pit of despair, moaning over squandered time and lost opportunity. I can do nothing about the past. My future is immediate. I will grasp it in both hands and carry it with running feet. When I am faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, I will always choose to act! I seize this moment. I choose now. — Andy Andrews

charge of a six-person team that you belong to. You walked in just as I was daydreaming, and I didn't grasp the real situation at that moment." "But that moment was the realest of my life," protested Markus without thinking. It had come right out of his heart. — David Foenkinos

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil. — Ralph Fiennes

In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand. This is the gift given to creative individuals who can identify with the mysteries of life through art. — Marcel Marceau

My worst days are still pretty good days. That's something I might lose in the moment sometimes, but I have a pretty good grasp of it. — Andy Roddick

Heading back into your life to dust off and decipher old memories allows you to fully grasp how much power you have always held in your life. It helps you start to see that the way you have stored your memories and the role you played in them can be altered by you at any moment. Truly. At any moment in time. Hell, with one phone call. — Lauren Handel Zander

She's walking toward me, and every step brings her close to my grasp. To the moment when I'll never let her go. — Alexa Riley

Life is full of uncertainties. Ye must grasp the moment. — Various

He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
'Time is slowing,' he said in a leaden voice. 'Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall. — Norman Lock

How did you know? That she wasn't the one for him?" Now he's staring at his hands, slowing rubbing them together. "They just didn't have that ... natural magic. You know? It never seemed easy."
My voice grows tiny. "Do you think things have to be easy? For it to work?"
Cricket's head shoots up, his eyes bulging as they grasp my meaning. "NO. I mean, yes, but ... sometimes there are ... extenuating circumstances. That prevent it from being easy. For a while. But then people overcome those ... circumstances ... and ... "
"So you believe in second chances?" I bite my lip.
"Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right," he adds.
If the person is ... Lola?"
This time, he holds my gaze. "Only if the other person is Cricket."
Chapter 27
Pg 273 — Stephanie Perkins

I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstorm realize. That light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment-perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depth of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been. — Haruki Murakami

At this moment the headmaster found Master Wesendonck's tall pile of books slipping from his grasp. He juggled frantically with them for a moment and then, to the infinite joy of the boarders and day boys, they crashed to the ground in all directions. A bevy of form masters rushed forward to the rescue. Master Wesendonck, realising with immense presence of mind that his natural enemies were for once in their proper place, grovelling on the floor, stood still and did nothing. — Angela Thirkell

Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant. — Italo Calvino

In the sacred connectedness of Love...

My consciousness has evolved enough to comprehend this existence is equivalent to a grasp of a dream, mentally unfathomable, the only potency is the truth of this moment.

Much love, peace and smiles to all~ — Dean Pusell

Time itself is a gift-curse. Time says: 'Look here! Here is a precious moment to do something with!' Then as soon as you try to grasp the moment, it's gone. And you haven't done anything. And while you're thinking about that, there is another moment, and then it too is gone. Cruel, like an eternal game of pass-the-parcel. — J.T. Lawrence

For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name — Boris Pasternak

The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds. Have me killed and Trantor will fall not within three centuries but within fifty years and you, yourself, within a single year. — Isaac Asimov

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, "Yes, yes, very good, very true - that's just what I'm always saying." I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Sometimes we scratch, claw and climb so hard to conquer a mountain that, once achieved, we cling to its summit much too long and it ultimately instigates our fall. As we dangle by our fingertips we grasp and claw at what's no more; with a fear of falling into the dim unknown. But, ironically, it's in that very moment that we are empowered to choose. We can stay cliff hanging in our darkened fears clinging to a time that has past us by or we can faithfully and freely fall into the hands of a new destiny. Sometimes, persevering...is simply having the courage to let go. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

Right there, at that precise moment, I felt as if I would be able to meet whatever challenges came my way, as if there were no limits to what I could do. This wasn't about writing, this was something else, a boundlessness, as if I could get up and go now, this very minute, and then just walk and walk to the end of the earth.
This feeling lasted for thirty seconds perhaps. Then it was gone, and even though I tried to summon it back it refused to return, a bit like a dream that goes, slips from your grasp as you struggle to recall it after waking. — Karl Ove Knausgard

It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness like you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand toward the floor — Andrew Solomon

True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways. — Lynn Coady

Why the Albanians had created the institution of the guest, exalting it above all other human relations, even those of kinship. "Perhaps the answer lies in the democratic character of this institution," he said, setting himself to think his way through the matter. "Any ordinary man, on any day, can be raised to the lofty station of a guest. The path to that temporary deification is open to anybody at any time.[ ... ] Given that anyone at all can grasp the sceptre of the guest," he went on, "and since that sceptre, for every Albanian, surpasses even the king's sceptre, may we not assume that in the Albanian's life of danger and want, that to be a guest if only for four hours or twenty-four hours, is a kind of respite, a moment of oblivion, a truce, a reprieve, and - why not? - an escape from everyday life into some divine reality? — Ismail Kadare

The oppressed without hope are mysteriously quiet. When the conception of change is beyond the limits of the possible, there are no words to articulate discontent so it is sometimes held not to exist. This mistaken belief arises because we can only grasp silence in the moment in which it is breaking. — Sheila Rowbotham

On the road leading from his ranch to Samantha's, Wyat t drove his surrey up a small hill and caught his breath as the beauty of the large crescent moon dangling just out of reach over the crest A full moon would have been plump with luminescence, yet the pearly surface of the sickle still cast enough light to shadow his surroundings and seemed close enough that once he drove to the top of the hill, he'd be able to touch the bottom horn or at least toss a rope around it. He slackened the reins, slowing the horse, knowing that the higher he climbed, the sooner the illusion of closeness would disappear and he wanted to preserve for a moment the fantasy that the moon was within his grasp.
The stars, by contrast, were distant pricks of diamond light farther out than a man could dream. He sighed. Life as a rancher or as a rancher's wife was not moon and stars easy or romantic. What would put stars in Samantha's eyes? — Debra Holland

When it comes right down to it, the challenge of mindfulness is to realize that "this is it" Right now is my life. The question is, What is my relationship to it going to be? Does my life just automatically "happen" to me? Am I a total prisoner of my circumstances or my obligations, of my body or my illness, or of my history? Do I become hostile or defensive or depressed if certain buttons get pushed, happy if other buttons are pushed, and frightened if something else happens? What are my choices? Do I have any options? We will be looking into these questions more deeply when we take up the subject of our reactions to stress and how our emotions affect our health. For now the important point is to grasp the value of bringing the practice of mindfulness into the conduct of our daily lives. Is there any waking moment of your life that would not be richer and more alive for you if you were more fully awake while it was happening? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

These Moments Cascade Upon One Another
Here at shepherd's dusk, in a valley without echo, I listen for you. With a frayed longing, I hear your shadow voice whispering within me from far away. I grasp at what is left of this husky sun lying golden upon the upper meadows of lodge pole and bear grass. I gather the last remnants of the evening's breeze, so cool and lazy within my arms, feeling it curl up like a small and innocent kitten. And I see that behind a cloak of clouds, dalliance suits the canting moon. Suddenly I do not wish to lose another moment, And I covet all pristine light. — Carew Papritz