Mayfly Quotes & Sayings

Look at the people in the very old photographs! They are gone forever but they still can give us messages with their eyes, they still can touch our hearts with their looks and they still can give us courage with their standing upright! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

God is a racist! He has a special elite race of supermen who are going to live above all others in the Holy City, the magical, mystical, marvelous, mysterious Space City! — David Berg

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. — Carl Sagan

Don't weep, insects
Lovers, stars themselves,
Must part. — Kobayashi Issa

The love I knew was from books.. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home [...], she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind's safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable [...]. — Jonathan Franzen

You're the mayfly,' he murmurs.
And then Evan Walker kisses me.
Holding my hand across his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I'm looking back at him. — Rick Yancey

Mind you, there is no value in learning. You are all mistaken in learning. The only value of knowledge is in the strengthening, the disciplining, of the mind. — Swami Vivekananda

Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space. — Piet Mondrian

The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains. — George Carlin

in the heart's rain
in the eye's fog
in the winter's smoky snow
in whirling snow
in storms
wind which wants to tear my coat off
legends stories
the blood red dawn of the mind
the warm spring between your thighs
the only haven — Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa

If you're an insect, then you're a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. — Rick Yancey

I will say yes to every favor, request, suggestion and invitation. I will swear to say yes where once I would say no. — Danny Wallace

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous. — John Berger

They rest in us and we in them. Our heart contains all others. One heart, one life, on the advent of a mayfly's final flight — Rick Yancey

He drops into the room, landing on the balls of his feet like a cat. I'm in his arms in the time it takes to say 'I love you,' which he does, stroking my hair, whispering my name and the words, 'My mayfly. — Rick Yancey

{W}hy did she go into the field? A twinge of pleasure, of knowledge. Her dad would pull over to the side of a bridge, and they would watch from above, before he slipped down the bank to catch them. She was charmed by the motions of trout. How they take their forms from the pressures of another world, the cold forge of water. Their drift, their mystery, the way they turn and let the current take them, take them, with passive grace. They turn again, tumbling like leaves, then straighten with mouths pointing upstream, to better sip a mayfly, to root up nymphs, to watch for the flash of a heron's bill. The current always trues them, like compass needles. When she watches them, she feels wise. — Matthew Neill Null

I had lone, schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the overlordship of the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation. — Jack London