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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
"If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'The jaws of darkness do devour it up;So quick bright things come to confusion."
"All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion."
"Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones."
"You think the things you can touch and feel are the things that are real, but they are not. Over time, they all get old and decline. The people, the houses, the rocks and the mountains: one day they will all crumble. This is because they are not as real as the things that last forever. It is another one of the lessons we come to teach."
"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."
"Money can buy you everything to fill your time but it cannot buy time itself. And things are definitely not time."
"Time melts away in every passing moment."
"Just because you believe something was true in the past does not mean it will be true in the future."
"Time is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at and who steals what is most precious to men."
"A red leaf danced from a branch like a dropping flame, down into the calm blue lake. A gust had broken it free. There was a cold bite in the wind. It was now deep autumn in the mountains."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client."
"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."
"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."
"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."
"Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works."
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
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