Quotes About Impermanence

My background wasn't one blessed with all the luxuries in life. Nothing is forever and I realize that.

There's a harsh reality - nothing lasts forever. You have to be ready to grow, and grow fast.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst.

to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.

Life is suffering, the Buddha said, by which he did not mean Every moment of life is unbearable but rather All happiness/rest/contentment is transient; all appearances of permanence are illusory.

All gifts are temporary.

I am not stable and Mary not stable and the very buildings and monuments here not stable and the greater city not stable and the wide world not stable. All alter, are altering, in every instant.

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled, The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun. (Ephemera)

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

The foolish man conceives the idea of 'self.' The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of 'self;' thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

It's just that...I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is.

the only thing that's permanent is destruction we're all going to disappear trying to leave a mark more permanent that myself.

I reread my favorite books to make sure they're still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.

Oh, but this,' I think I say, 'is perfect! This is all I have longed for! What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted--

The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. The vital thing was to make the most of the moments of brightness.

Everybody dies. Life is not a substance, like water or rock; it's a process, like fire or a wave crashing on the shore. It's a process that begins, lasts for a while, and ultimately ends. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity.

Life is not a substance, like water or rock; it's a process, like fire or a wave crashing on the shore. It's a process that begins, lasts for a while, and ultimately ends. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity.

Anything we have, we are only borrowing. Anything. Any time.

Time changes the nature of the whole world; Everything passes from one state to another And nothing stays like itself.

I was realizing, for the first time, that everything goes on, turns gray, is ruined in the living. That there is no end to our story until death comes and the body decays.

Fashion is magical, a fantasy. It's madness, and it doesn't last. It's changing all the time.