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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
"The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it's perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it's only absolutely perfect when it's falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!."
"Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes."
"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."
"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."
"She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, 'All are shadows!-all are passing!-all is past!"
"Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing."
"Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."
"Money can buy you everything to fill your time but it cannot buy time itself. And things are definitely not time."
"I knew from the start we were nothing like "forever". Maybe because forever is such a scary place."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."
"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
"The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education."
"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
"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."
"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."
"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."
"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."
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