Moment

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• Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
  Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
  • T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", 1917

• I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker...
  • T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)

• But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
  The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
  The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
  Be remembered; involved with past and future.
  • T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton" (1935)

• The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
  For the pattern is new in every moment
  And every moment is a new and shocking
  Valuation of all we have been.
  • T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "East Coker" (1940)

• For most of us, there is only the unattended
  Moment, the moment in and out of time,
  The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
  The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
  Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
  That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
  While the music lasts.
  • T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages" (1941)

• Oh, if life were made of moments,
  Even now and then a bad one!
  But if life were only moments,
  Then you'd never know you had one.
  • Stephen Sondheim, Into The Woods (1986), "Moments In The Woods"

• The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Chapter 2

• Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Chapter 4

• I beg my mirror image for a moment with my soul
  • Phish, Rift, "It's Ice" (1992)

• Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments.
  • Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One (1931-1934)