Quotes About Impermanence

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

Nought may endure but mutability

One thing I learned in this world? Things don't last. People say they do. They don't. Your friends, they die. The wars go on and on and on, then they end. People say they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and they don't.

You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.

The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts. This is the only place for our Dream. No form nor interpretation is for ever. A form has to become fixed for a short time, then it has to go. As the world changes, there will and must be new and totally unpredictable Dreams.

She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.

Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind. Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.

Still. No resolution ever. None. Nothing decided, nothing finished. The Dipper wheels back into place. Just one turn. One turn of the wheel and we are different, never the same. Not ever. Not even those stars. Even they, they decay, collapse, coalesce, break apart. Close my eyes.

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman's screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

But every river story they had ever read was just beneath the surface of their imaginations and must have fired them with extra energy and braced them, too, because at least half of those stories did not have happy endings.

So man wastes away like something rotten, like a moth-eaten garment.

As water disappears from the sea and a river becomes parched and dry,

But as a mountain erodes and crumbles and a rock is dislodged from its place,

The house he built is like a mothís cocoon, like a hut set up by a watchman.

when the wind passes over, it vanishes, and its place remembers it no more.

for riches are not forever, nor does a crown endure to every generation.

It will break in pieces like a potterís jar, shattered so that no fragment can be found. Not a shard will be found in the dust large enough to scoop the coals from a hearth or to skim the water from a cistern.”

No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner have their stems taken root in the ground, than He blows on them and they wither, and a whirlwind sweeps them away like stubble.

Therefore they will be like the morning mist, like the early dew that vanishes, like chaff blown from a threshing floor, like smoke through an open window.

“As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”