Life Continuity Quotes & Sayings

Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime. — Ken Burns

The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. — Stephen King

She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures ... — Henry James

There's no greatest moment in the arts. It's a life, it's a continuity thing. You can't have a great moment because it's spiritual. It's a belief, it's a calling. If you're an artist, doing your own thing on your own, it's while you're doing it that counts. It's a process. If you get too elated, you can get too depressed. — LeRoy Neiman

The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed. One of the characteristics of privacy, prior to the discovery of the intimate, was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind. This, precisely, was the ultimate reason for the tremendous contempt held for it by antiquity. The emergence of society has changed the estimate of this whole sphere but has hardly transformed its nature. The monolithic character of every type of society, its conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion, is ultimately rooted in the one-ness of man-kind. — Hannah Arendt

Music creates order out of chaos. — Yehudi Menuhin

It's a given that we exist in a world where we have to live in continuity every day; no one is immune to that, in life or romance novels. By the same token, it's not something I find terribly important. — Neil Gaiman

Genius may be for an hour or a thousand years; its indispensable quality is continuity with the life-push. — Mary Hunter Austin

MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA. — Andrei Tarkovsky

The seventh reader interrupts you: "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."
You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla. — Italo Calvino

For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love. — Eudora Welty

This bicovenantal nature of God's plan for redemption is important in theonomy's argument that there is one moral law revelaed in Scripture and this one moral law governs all men. Theonomy makes a clear distinction between the moral law and ceremonial aspects of God's law. This distinction is *covenantal* in nature, and explains how theonomy maintains basic continuity in biblical ethics from the Old to New Testaments, while advocating discontinuity between the Testaments in terms of ceremonies, certain aspects of public worship, and other select forms of covenant life. — William O. Einwechter

Reality is what I make it. That is what I have said I believed. Then I look at the hell I am wallowing in, nerves paralyzed, action nullified - fear, envy, hate: all the corrosive emotions of insecurity biting away at my sensitive guts. Time, experience: the colossal wave, sweeping tidal over me, drowning, drowning. How can I ever find that permanence, that continuity with past and future, that communication with other human beings that I crave? Can I ever honestly accept an artificial imposed solution? How can I justify, how can I rationalize the rest of my life away? — Sylvia Plath

I get furious at stairways, furious at doors, at
walls, furious at everyday life which interferes with the continuity of
ecstasy. — Anais Nin

And so we come to the last crisis, that of integrity versus disgust and despair. Throughout the life-cycle the pieces have been assembled, structure built on structure around the ego's continuity. Now with death not too far away, can it all hold up or will it crumble? Are the links of love and meaning strong enough so that we are ourselves content to fall away. — Charles Hampden-Turner

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death. — Milan Kundera

Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. — John Dewey

That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one's death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning. — Dean Koontz

There are only hallucinations, or perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days ... and that life is continuous; yet that one would never be aware of its continuity, nor even that life exists without these pendulum movements; and life is primarily verified by the beating of the heart — Alfred Jarry

When you are dying and coming to life in each moment, would-be scientific predictions about what will happen after death are of little consequence. The whole glory of it is that we do not know. Ideas of survival and annihilation are alike based on the past, on memories of waking and sleeping, and, in their different ways, the notions of everlasting continuity and everlasting nothingness are without meaning. It needs but slight imagination to realize that everlasting time is a monstrous nightmare, so that between heaven and hell as ordinarily understood there is little to choose. — Alan W. Watts

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Don't you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ourselves for victory and fame, as if these might swindle mortality and extend us somehow. Then, as death bears down, we agonize over how little we have achieved. — Tom Rachman

People build continuity into their life: Places, friends and goals. We go to work on Monday with plans for Friday night, enroll as freshmen intending to be seniors and save money for retirement. We try to control what comes next and shape it to meet our will. — Nathaniel Fick

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life. — Tom Stoppard

Is not a problem looking for a quick fix. Life is a conversation and you need places to have it. The virtual provides us with more spaces for these conversations and these are enriching. But what makes the physical so precious is that it supports continuity in a different way; it doesn't come and go, and it binds people to it. You can't just log off or drop out. — Sherry Turkle

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now. — Anne Waldman

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life. — Eric Hoffer

The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew - family, home, friends - writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done. — Ian McEwan

In the same way your life is the continuity of standing up, sitting down, laughing, sleeping, waking up, drinking, eating, and, of course, being born and dying. That is the continuity of the whole universe. — Yamada Koun

Today it may seem that your anger is very strong, how can meditation break it? But it breaks - it has always broken. Rock is very strong and meditation is very delicate, but this is the mystery of life - the continuity of the delicate can break the strongest and the hardest. — Rajneesh

People take love's continuity for granted, just as they take their body's continuity for granted. They don't realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it's an added foundation to your life. — David Levithan

Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes. — Sherry Turkle

And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head. — Vita Sackville-West

I don't want to love her. I don't want to be in love. People take love's continuity for granted, just as they take their body's continuity for granted. They don't realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it's an added foundation to your life. But if you cannot have that regular presence, you only have the one foundation to support you, always. — David Levithan

There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks or divisions - seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life. — Susan Hill

A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life ... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized. — Ralph Davis

Reverence for the natural environment, and experiencing the interconnectedness between all things has long guided me to create watercolor paintings of beauty and spirit. Life's continuing adventure has led me into an exciting exploration into the wisdom and symbolic imagery of Sacred Geometry. These paintings act as a bridge between this reality and a metaphorical world of healing, continuity, and transformation. I use multiple transparent watercolor glazes coupled with image overlapping techniques, and sacred geometry to produce visions of a multi-dimensional reality. It is my intention to create art that embodies the vibration of Universal Love and expresses the joy and gratitude I feel for the honor of being part of this earthwalk."
~Blessings, Francene~ — Francene Hart

Keep the bicycle moving, because if you stop pedalling, you will fall off. — Paulo Coelho

She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures
a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject. — Henry James

Daniel's desk by the window is piled high with his drawings. The artwork is everything. He thinks of himself as the act of drawing. His body of work is his life, it is his continuity. The drawings show outwardly that inner place where he is still alive, a thread to connect him with the world. — J.J. Brown

Life is a continuity always and always. There is no final destination it is going towards. Just the pilgrimage, just the journey in itself is life, not reaching to some point, no goal - just dancing and being in pilgrimage, moving joyously, without bothering about any destination. — Rajneesh

My Lord, I am but few moments of the continuity of universal life, and I understand I am nothing other than that - a part of cosmic sacrifice! — Preeth Nambiar

When fear dissolves, you no longer separate yourself from this single flow of immense force. Love is continuity with infinite life force, a Oneness of being with no separation. Love is the key to opening to this flow of life force. — David Deida

A worshiping community should be the fountain from which life flows and the ocean into which your efforts are merged. That is where identity is defined, refined, and consolidated and where continuity remains. — Ravi Zacharias

In every life, there was death and rebirth and continuity. — Mary Alice Monroe

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. The concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were one's own, ie, they had the same ego form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body. — Carl Jung

It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity
so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy
of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery ... — John Cowper Powys

The little religion that I have clung to-that what matters most is the continuity of life, and its improvement from one generation to another. — David O. Selznick

One of the major challenges facing creative individuals is that of building upon the continuity of human knowledge while achieving novel insights ... On the one hand, to intensify an inquiry and develop a sense of commitment to a creative life, the learner needs models, teachers, and collaborators. On the other hand, the individual, while building upon the past, needs to transform it, and thus broaden his or her choices. — Vera John-Steiner

For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life. — Marcel Proust

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. — Italo Calvino

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness. — Adrienne Rich

In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him.

My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world. — Sarah Manguso

Memory performs the impossible for man; holds together past and present, gives continuity and dignity to human life. — Mark Van Doren

I'm asked so often whether I believe in life after death. I do believe in the sanctity of life, the continuity of life and of energy. I know the anonymity of death has no appeal for me. It is the now that I must face and want to face. — Martha Graham

The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in. — Arthur Koestler

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone. — Alice Walker

Everything science has taught me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal. — Werner Von Braun

There is no foreground or background, only a continuity of interlacing relationships — Lyonel Feininger

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life. — Julio Cortazar

It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one's own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to experience victory. Nothing is disturbed - neither inwardly nor outwardly, for one's own continuity has withstood the current of life and of time. But that can come to pass only when one does not meddle inquisitively with the workings of fate. I — C. G. Jung

The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,
flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time. — John Greenleaf Whittier

Your background should not dictate the rest of your life ; there is success in continuity. — Osunsakin Adewale

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama. — Adrienne Rich

The spirituality that I experience sometimes touches on religion, in that I resonate with the thread of continuity that permeates through all religions. But in terms of it being a concretized, organized part of my life, it's not. — Alanis Morissette

In real life, when emotions and sentiments are involved and the very continuity of life is at stake, there are no quantitative theories, linear programming, and applied mechanics available to solve those problems. — Girdhar Joshi

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. — Thomas Pynchon

Psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation. — Henri Bergson

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless. — Samuel Johnson

He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. — George Orwell

A gentle mixture of furniture expresses life and continuity but it must be a judicious mixture that flows and mixes well. It is a bit like mixing a salade. (I am better at room than salads). — Nancy Lancaster

I guess she was a life line
Sewing our family fabric together
From me to dad to her
Gave me a sense of continuity
Especially when my daughter was born
As she was slipping away — Richard L. Ratliff

You never begin a new life. It's a mistake to think that you end one part of your life and start another as if there's no continuity. — Rudy Giuliani

It feels like I've been waiting a century to do that. It's like time has lost all continuity. Every second with you outweighs days of life before I met you. — Stephanie Meyer

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life. — John Cassavetes

We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence ... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity. — Louise J. Kaplan

One current of continuity runs underneath all the abortive phases of my life. From childhood on I have been obliged to drop anything I was doing to run after any man who seemed to know a little more than I did about God ... I most want to write about: how a modern woman has sought the face of God-not the name nor the fame but the face [ital] of God-and what adventures came to meet her on this ancient human path. — Mary Antin

Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. Ideally, though, we're lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness. But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find. — Aziz Ansari

The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity. — Walter Lippmann

Gaming was "one of the only times when you only have to focus on one thing." But even more than that, "It's like an anchor. As long as I know it's there, it's part of me. It's some form of continuity that in my life I desperately need. — Alexandra Robbins

My children were brought up with their grandparents, and I was brought up with my grandparents. I think the continuity of moving through life together gives people a certain pride and sense of security. — Francesca Annis

I've lived in a preindustrial (rural Argentina) as well as an industrial world. You experience a different sense of time in a community that works the land. Human relationships aren't professionalized or contractualized; family and friends take primacy. Life has much more continuity than discontinuity. There's a great deal of poetry in everyday life. — Shoshana Zuboff

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

It is a strange phenomenon, how absence is the only authentic vessel of the past, how otherwise it is forgotten, overlooked for its continuity and perdurability - every sensory detail of the past breathes through its emptiness the way the light of a match illuminates the darkness; otherwise all is darkness, all is presence, everything in its place and thus unnoticed, whereas the past is missing, the part cut out of the photograph, the part the present attempts to seal over with the future, seeking to close the hole, pandering to the illusion of movement and change when in reality all of life is in flux, particle for particle, atom for atom, void for void, thought for thought. — John M. Keller

Eternal life is personal existence in continuity with the present life, but transfigured. — Georgia Harkness

When you have a knowledge of history, it's very soothing. When there's continuity in your life, it's soothing. — Sandra Bernhard

Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel. — Morris West

Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind. — Evan Thompson

When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end. — James Robertson

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are. — Stephen Jay Gould

Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. "And what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place." The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. — Teju Cole

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. — Oliver Sacks

If I die, don't take this too hard," she counseled them, "death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern. — Louise Erdrich

Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music. — Ross David Burke

So you don't ever get angry at him?"
Jem laughed out loud. "I would hardly say that. Sometimes I want to strangle him."
"How on earth do you prevent yourself?"
"I go to my favorite place in London," said Jem, "and I stand and look at the water, and I think about the continuity of life, and how the river rolls on, oblivious of the petty upsets in our lives."
Tessa was fascinated. "Does that work?"
"Not really, but after that I think about how I could kill him while he slept if I really wanted to, and then I feel better. — Cassandra Clare

in Sante Fe time is not that shallow. There one can go deep into a continuity as the pueblos and the culture they represent take one back at least eight hundred years through a single Indian dance. For a European that continuity is life-giving. — May Sarton

I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.
[Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe, Locus Magazine, September 1998] — Sheri S. Tepper

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe? — Salman Rushdie