Lines copied from Tristram Shandy

Sometime before her death on September 6, 1782, Thomas Jefferson's wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson copied these lines from Laurence Sterne’s popular novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman:

Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen, the days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day never to return more every thing presses on –

Thomas Jefferson finished the quotation:

and every time I kiss the hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

After her death, Thomas Jefferson kept this page as a memento mori.