Without A Trace Quotes

• A man dies ... only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they're gone, he's forgotten, without a trace, as if he'd never even existed. And that's all.

  Wolfgang Borchert

  Death, Men, Circles

  56 Copy quote

• Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

  E. O. Wilson

  Blessed, Enemy, Energy

  18 Copy quote

• What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

  Pablo Picasso

  Time, Zero, Children

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

  Margaret Atwood

  Time, Sand, Quicksand

  Margaret Atwood (2014). “The MaddAddam Trilogy Bundle: The Year of the Flood; Oryx & Crake; MaddAddam”, p.571, Anchor

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• It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

  George Eliot

  Friends, Thinking, Fiber

  George Eliot (2010). “The Works of George Eliot”, General Books

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• Inaction will cause a man to sink into the slough of despond and vanish without a trace.

  Farley Mowat

  Men, Causes, Slough

  49 Copy quote

• To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

  W. G. Sebald

  Summer, Fall, Men

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “The Rings of Saturn”, p.18, New Directions Publishing

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• The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

  Helen Vendler

  Artist, Busy, Disappear

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• The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

  Paul Theroux

  Self, Vanishing, Improvement

  Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing in later times.

  David Bohm

  Inspirational, Giving, Transformation

  David Bohm (2004). “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics”, p.1, Routledge

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• The person who did all of these things has gone away, vanished without a trace in the ecstasy of existence.

  Frederick Lenz

  Gone Away, Samadhi, Existence

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• There's a terrible delight in watching a rival sink without a trace

  Bernard Hinault

  Delight, Rivals, Terrible

  16 Copy quote

• But India did not pass me by without a trace: it left tracks which lead me from one infinity to another infinity.

  Carl Jung

  Track, India, Infinity

  Carl Gustav Jung (1973). “Memories, dreams, reflections”, Random House Inc

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• Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Pregnancy, Pride, Guilt

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• Howard Altmann has found a way to make language transform itself. If the elusive moment between I and Thou could speak, it might be one of his quietly amazing lines-'you ask the silence to invert itself / like a gymnast in the dark . . . ' Without a trace of rhetoric, In This House reminds us of the power of poetry: to show us how to live in a world in which we are strangers. It's a thrill to come close to such an original and deeply realized art.

  Dennis Nurkse

  Art, Dark, Silence

  4 Copy quote

• Thirty, thirty-five, forty, all had come to visit her like admonitory relatives, and all had slipped away without a trace, without a sound, and now, once again, she was waiting.

  Evan S. Connell

  Funny, Birthday, Meaningful

  EVAN S. CONNELL, JR. (1959). “MRS. BRIDGE”

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• Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. ... Everything science has taught me-and continues to teach me-strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace.

  Wernher von Braun

  Inspirational, Death, Spiritual

  Wernher Von Braun (2007). “The Voice of Dr. Wernher Von Braun: An Anthology”, Collectors Guide Pub

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• They were not friends, Comdrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Matthew, and they didn't trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly, adult. They looked out into the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.

  Arundhati Roy

  Men, Childhood, Doubt

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• A debt should be paid off till the last penny; An enemy should be destroyed without a trace

  Chanakya

  Enemy, Debt, Lasts

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• I was learning the importance of names - having them, making them - but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace.

  Josephine Baker

  Yawning, Names, Recognition

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• I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Real, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

  Terry Pratchett

  Dragons, People, Evil

  "Guards! Guards!". Book by Terry Pratchett, 1989.

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• My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Thinking, Vegetables

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.50, Profile Books

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• Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

  Leonid Andreyev

  Men, Darkness, Void

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• There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Responsibility, Editors, Two

  Source: www.theoryculturesociety.org

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