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No Trace Quotes

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“The flowers of life are but visionary. How many pass away and leave no trace behind! How few yield any fruit, and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! And yet there are flowers enough; and is it not strange, my friend, that we should suffer the little that does really ripen to rot, decay, and perish unenjoyed?”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe —

“He was dead.
No trace of pain, no sufferings, no victimization.”

— Prerna Varma

“I knew then that I would have to be careful. I would have to wear gloves, to leave no trace when I burgled the crammed house of feeling and took for my own use exuberance depression suspicion terror.”

— Janet Frame

“Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.”

— Roberto BolaÃ±o

“Come to me swiftly, carry no trace. Lift me softly, then flow and race.”

— Shannon Messenger

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”

— DÅgen

“Perhaps another great ice will come and grind all this into dust. Leaving no trace of our existence, as even fire does.”

— Philipp Meyer

“This was the lesson we kept learning over and over and over, the lesson our mother was best capable of teaching us. Love-whatever else it might or might not be-was fleeting. Love stormed into your life and occupied it, it took over every corner of your soul, made itself comfortable, made itself wanted, then treasured, then necessary, love did all of this and then it did next the only thing it had left to do, it retreated, it vanished, it left no trace of itself. Love was horrifying.”

— Christie Hodgen

“I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing.”

— Khushwant Singh

“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.”

— Damon Galgut

“It hurts. It's like someone cut a hole right through my chest. It hurts, hurts, hurt, hurts. But I'll be fine. This pain too, will go away at last ... Just like the fire of the cigarette. How we met ... What we said ... It's all burning to ashes ... 'til there's no trace left. I don't want to admit it.”

— Minari Endou

“Finally he said that in his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until there were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. I can't remember the world of light, he said. It has been so long. The world is a fragile world. Ultimately, what can be seen is what endures. What is true ...
In my first years of blindness, I thought it was a form of death. I was wrong. Losing one's sight is like falling in a dream. You think there's no bottom to this abyss. You fall and fall. Light recedes. Memory of light. Memory of the world. Of your own face. Of the grim-faced mask.”

— Cormac McCarthy

“In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his story through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to beat upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.”

— Cormac McCarthy

“Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties ... Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.”

— Elisabeth Tova Bailey

“And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate. Once the surface charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable.”

— Martha Stout

“The informality of his posture, combined with the strict formality of his clothes, gave him an air of superlative elegance. His was the only face that had the carefree look and the brilliant smile proper to the enjoyment of a party; but his eyes seemed intentionally expressionless, holding no trace of gaiety, showing-like a warning signal-nothing but the activity of a heightened perceptiveness.”

— Ayn Rand

“So you shun me? - you shut yourself up and grieve alone! I would rather you had come and upbraided me with vehemence. You are passionate: I expected a scene of some kind. I was prepared for the hot rain of tears; only I wanted them to be shed on my breast: now a senseless floor has received them, or your drenched handkerchief. But I err: you have not wept at all! I see a white cheek and faded eye, but no trace of tears. I suppose, then, that your heart has been weeping blood?”

— Charlotte BrontÃ«

“When an arguer argues dispassionately, he thinks only of the argument, and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately ... had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one would thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact as one accepts that a pea is green or a canary yellow.”

— Virginia Woolf

“When one puts up a building one makes an elaborate scaffold to get everything into its proper place. But when one takes the scaffold down, the building must stand by itself with no trace of the means by which it was erected. That is how a musician should work.”

— Andres Segovia

“When Barrons looks at me like that, it rattles me. Lust, in those ancient, obsidian eyes, offers no trace of humanity. Doesn't even bother trying. Savage Mac wants to invite it to come out and play. I think she's nuts. Nuts, I tell you.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“She smiled, a warm smile that held no trace of
aberrant humor.
It bothered him on a level he couldn't comprehend.
It bothered him on a level he couldn't comprehend.
He experienced an overwhelming urge to grab that
smile and hide it solely for himself to gaze upon. A
Da Vinci masterpiece he intended to jealously
guard.”

— Anne Mallory

“Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.”

— Mary McCarthy

“An arrow may fly through the air and leave no trace; but an ill thought leaves a trail like a serpent.”

— Charles Mackay

“I sat on a somewhat higher sand dune and watched the eastern sky. Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale, [ ... ] than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could comprehend. As I sat and watched, the feeling overtook me that my very life was slowly dwindling into nothingness. There was no trace here of anything as insignificant as human undertakings. This same event had been occurring hundreds of millions - hundreds of billions - of times, from an age long before there had been anything resembling life on earth.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Of your friend, I can find no trace," said the man. "He seems to have been eaten by one of the thin hairless apes from the Okanti isles; all it does is screech at me. What became of the last leech to take a look at him?" "We left him in Talisham," said Jean. "I'm afraid my friend's attitude moved him to bring an early end to his own sea voyage." "Well, I might have done the same. I waive my fee, in profound sympathy. Keep your silver-you shall need it for wine. Or poison.”

— Scott Lynch

“Arin remmembered seeing her hand in Javelin's mane, curling into the coarse strands. This made him remember the almost freakish lenghth between her littlest finger and thumb as her hand spanned piano keys. The black star of the birth-mark. He saw her again in the imperial palace. Her music room. He'd seen that room only once. About a month ago, right before Firstsummer. Her blue sleeves were fastened at the wrist.
Something tugged inside him. A flutter of unease.
Do you sing? Those had been her first words to him, the day she had bought him. A band of nausea circled Arin's throat, just as it had when she had asked him that question, in part for the same reason. She'd had no trace of an accent. She had spoken in perfect, natural, mother-taught Herrani.”

— Marie Rutkoski

“Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She'd swallow everything-her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there'd be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made.”

— Marie Rutkoski

“I stopped short and sighed as Derek stepped up behind me, arms sliding around my waist. I leaned back against him and relaxed.
"Thought I told you to come home," he said, bending to my ear. There was no trace of anger in his voice now.
"Did you really expect me to listen?"
Now it was his turn to sigh. "Always worth a shot."”

— Kelley Armstrong

“I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.”

— Daniel Clowes

“Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes - except that there were no ashes.”

— Wilfred Burchett

“Rather, like the anarchists of the last century, he didn't care if he was killed or not. They just wanted to be known. We found no trace of any conspiracy.”

— John Sherman Cooper

“She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture, but of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement-for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium. A rich and living peace.”

— Aldous Huxley

“In New York, I run into Packers fans who have never lived in Wisconsin, Canadiens fans who have never lived in La Belle Province, Celtics fans who admire Russell and Bird and Pierce but have no trace of a Boston accent.”

— George Vecsey

“She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri

“I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.”

— Tom Stoppard

“I have in my mind's eye an image of what a perfect mother and wife should be; and in her whom I must call "Mother" I find no trace of that image.”

— Anne Frank

“Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“The happiest man is he who has no trace of malice in his soul. PLATO”

— Matthieu Ricard

“If a man is crossing a river and an empty boat collides with his own skiff, even though he be a bad-tempered man he will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, he will shout at him to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, he will shout again, and yet again, and begin cursing. And all because there is somebody in the boat. Yet if the boat were empty, he would not be shouting, and not angry. If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world, no one will oppose you, no one will seek to harm you ... . Who can free himself from achievement, and from fame, descend and be lost amid the masses of men? He will flow like Tao, unseen, he will go about like Life itself with no name and no home. Simple is he, without distinction. To all appearances he is a fool. His steps leave no trace. He has no power. He achieves nothing, has no reputation. Since he judges no one, no one judges him. Such is the perfect man: His boat is empty.”

— Osho

“But there is nothing, no trace that she's ever existed. She is not here. She will never be here again.
Because of me.”

— Christine Fonseca

“Our studies have shown that all cases of typhoid of this type have arisen by contact, that is, carried directly from one person to another. There was no trace of a connection to drinking water.”

— Robert Koch

“We must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them.”

— Sarah Bernhardt

“It may be that there is no God, that the existence of all that is beautiful and in any sense good is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly swirling atoms, that we are alone in a world that cares nothing for us or for the values that we create and sustain - that we and they are here for a moment only, and gone, and that eventually there will be left no trace of us in the universe. A man may well believe that this dredful thing is true. But only the fool will say in his heart that he is glad that it is true.”

— Sterling M. McMurrin

“Our steps invent the path as we proceed; behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go ...
Tahar ben Jelloun”

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

“The hardest grief is often that which leaves no trace.”