Quotes About Permanence

But good hymns? They live past the people who wrote them. Hymns never die.

Hope founded upon a human being, a man-made philosophy or any institution is always misplaced... because these things are unreliable and fleeting.

Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No matter how close they are, they are not here. What they said, when they said it, it is not now.

The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence.

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

Besides, if comics have taught us anything, it's that death is rarely a permanent condition." "But we're not superheroes," May argued. "Speak for yourself," Jackdaw told her.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath too short a date.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it thought, savoring the brute constancy of humans and their achievements, no matter how far through the ages they slithered. It was over 800 years old, and didn't look a day over seventy-five.

Skin is a covering for our immortality.

fragility of life, finality of death

Does all the beauty of the world stop when you die?" "No," said the Old Oak; "it will last much longer - longer than I can even think of." "Well, then," said the little May-fly, "we have the same time to live; only we reckon differently.

A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.

Mas'r," said Tom, "I know ye can do dreadful things; but,"—he stretched himself upward and clasped his hands,—"but, after ye've killed the body, there an't no more ye can do. And O, there's all ETERNITY to come, after that!

We are being solidified by modernity into states that, in prior eras, would have been more ephemeral.

I've been all over the place in all kinds of living situations. Due to the fact that my mind is my own worst enemy. In a way I am perpetually and permanently in a state of rehabilitation m in an attempt to rehabilitate from the shock of being born.Some people are too sensitive to withstand that.

P]aper's just as permanent once you send it out into the world. It seems like it closes the story, settles on one ending eliminating infinite possibilities, fixes it in place, in voice, but no, it does the opposite. You write it down so others can read it, and then it can grow. You nail it to a moment so it can pass through time.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

I looked like this when I was young, and I still do.

I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, and because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind.

By its very nature every architecture is a statement about what we expect to remain constant and what we admit may vary.

Forever doesn't exist. The concept of it all is just a process, a thought we create to give us confidence in our choices, a promise before the end. Forever is like a blooming cherry blossom, beautiful even after the wind has blown it away from home to settle on the tainted ground below.

Revolution!" cried Grandmother. "What does that have to do with anything? People still have to live, to marry, and to bear children! Your father thinks things will change. Perhaps they will. But men will always be men, and women will always be women. Some things never change!

For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.

The children playing by the fountains will become old men, but nothing of this will have changed