Quotes About Impermanence

Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

The body will blossom and fade, but you will remain after this body of yours has gone away. This knowledge allows you to love the body without attachment. Thus, the body becomes absolutely pure.

Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself.

I love catching a snapshot of something that is just about to happen. Or maybe something that just happened, you know. But I like especially that just-before kind of feeling.

Nothing mortal makes last; nothing the gods make endures forever.

In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday.

Man must be prepared for every event of life, for there is nothing that is durable.

Was there really such a thing as forever? Nay. There was but a moment in time, and those who were wise lived each moment to its fullest, for a moment gone could never come again.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

So perhaps it was her grief I felt as I gazed on this child not mine, and not even much of a child anymore. Grief not for him, nor for Martha exactly, but for all my lost selves, which I liked to imagine were still somehow there, waiting for my return. But those selves were long gone. I would never be younger again. This was so simple it went without saying, but unsaid, one could try to forget it.

to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time?

Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself.

He concluded his speech by citing an old parable, of an Eastern monarch who charged his wise men to invent a sentence that would apply to all times and in all situations. The wise men returned with "And this too shall pass away.

It's all right that there are things that you do not get over, not really. You just go on, knowing that the things you love could be stripped from you at any moment, remembering to love them now. It makes you human. You try to be decent and treat people gently, knowing that they, too, have their scars and madness that, like yours, do not show.

We are here to prepare for not being here.

Antes de avanzar, pensó, volvió a descubrir, que el pasado no vale más que un sueño ajeno.

Cuánto tiempo es para siempre? —preguntó Alicia. —A veces sólo un segundo —respondió el Conejo Blanco. LEWIS CARROLL

también, al mismo tiempo, sé que lo pasado no es inmóvil ni está fijo, a pesar de la ilusión de los documentos: tantas fotografías y cartas y filmaciones que permiten pensar en la inmutabilidad de lo ya visto, lo ya escuchado, lo ya leído. No: nada de eso es definitivo.

La mañana entera, con su cuerpo incluso que la atraviesa desplazándose sobre las baldosas grises, y el yo impalpable y ubicuo que lleva adentro, desaparecen detrás de las imágenes que, ya casi definitivas, son, aunque vengan de la memoria, intemporales, y más indestructibles, podría decirse, que el aliento y la carne que las contienen.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

What would you have me do, Odo? We're all terminal cases. Even our cultures. Even our worlds. A hundred years for an individual and he's gone, only a memory for a hundred more, at most. Perhaps longer if he's someone to whom they build statues. But after a thousand years, whom do we really remember?

There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.

Das Schöne an der Zeit ist, dass sie ohne Hilfestellung vergeht und sich nicht an dem stört, was in ihr geschieht. Auch die nächste Handvoll Sekunden wird sich vom Acker machen, und schon ist das, was eben noch unmöglich erschien, vergangen und vorbei. Warten ist nicht schwer. Das Leben besteht aus Warten. Folglich, beschließt Sebastian, ist das Leben kinderleicht.