in the twinkling of an eye

1. In an instant, as in The breakup of Yugoslavia created many warring nations in the twinkling of an eye. This hyperbolic expression, which alludes to the very brief time it takes for an eye to blink, is heard less often today. [c. 1300]

Example Sentences

The sonic extravagance of the gargantuan Bolívar Second in sonorous Disney Hall became a massive and perhaps overwrought Mahlerian drama of passing from one fraught world, though sentimental remembrance of life’s little and very big things, to another world, with a firestorm of orchestral brilliance and a large chorus proclaiming, “Rise again, yes, you will rise again … in the twinkling of an eye.”

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Robert Louis Stevenson said in 1878 of nearby South Bridge: "To look over the South Bridge and see the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers is to view one rank of society from another in the twinkling of an eye."

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But the change that now came into my life, into all our lives, blasting its way into our village, seemed wrought in the twinkling of an eye.

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“Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.”

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Why does a writer who, on one page, excoriates Joseph Conrad for cliché, for the sin of “in the twinkling of an eye,” so blandly deploy “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” — and worse?

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