top of page
"When you're young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don't Lyra."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Impermanence quotes

"Memories, like everything else, are momentary."

"And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be."

"Don't wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow may be too late. If we know how to live according to the insight of impermanence, we will not make many mistakes. We can be happy right now. We can love our beloved, care for her, and make her happy today. And we won't run toward the future, losing our life, which is available only in the present moment."

"Sometimes it takes a miracle to remind us that the only permanent condition is that of impermanence."

"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat."

"Each moment cancels the last. In the end there is nothing, not even the end."

"We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward."

"Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."

"Time melts away in every passing moment."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman

"Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world."

"I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!"

"As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms."

"I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike 'identity', must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ('gay', 'black', 'Muslim', whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity."

"The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter."

"Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn't worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!"
bottom of page