Quotes About Impermanence

It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story.

If you walk away from a sandcastle, it won't be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they're more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don't look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.

Leaving the people and places you love, is a reminder of the impermanence of this life. And the permanence of the next.

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.

Except for Love, nothing you see will remain forever.

I learn to love the thing that has to be erased, the thing I may not be allowed to keep, sand that runs away beneath my running feet.

Everything alive must die. Every building built to the sky will fall. Don't try to tell me my everlasting love is a lie.

Everything in this world will pass away. In eternity only Love will remain.

Theater is so ephemeral, and I love that.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

Some comedians love their characters. I don't fall in love with mine. In fact, I get tired of them very fast. You have to be willing to throw it all away.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

That's the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

Al margen de su imposibilidad, el concepto de mirar activamente la degradación de la materia, que incluye la de nuestro propio cuerpo, es una saludable terapia estoica que ayuda a aceptar el paso despiadado del tiempo.

The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving nothing in the way of trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life…

I notice that the artists, if that is what they are, at the tables around, have noticed my Scandinavian. Their artist girlfriends have noticed her New York fashions. And I never cease to notice her beauty, sad, as all beauty is, because it is not eternal.

Whatever has the nature to arise has the nature to cease.

We can then see for ourselves the obvious truth that when we cling or hold on to that which changes, we suffer.

All things arise when the appropriate conditions are present, and all things pass away as conditions change. Behind the process, there is no "self" who is running the show.

A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

We must die without much delay, and corpses may not require such expansive wrappings, in order to go the way of all flesh.