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"Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?"
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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 John Updike
"Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience."
"Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner."
"A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens."
"It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."
"Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works."
"The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."
"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."
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