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"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."
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"Memories, like everything else, are momentary."

"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."

"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."

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

"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!"

"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."

"The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last-that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security."

"We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!"

"Do not delude yourself, tomorrow is not guaranteed; and even if good fortune brings you your tomorrow, there is no guarantee those you love will be a part of it. Do not squander your precious, limited time. Value what love you have in your life - nothing is more valuable. Make it known to those who matter."
Explore more quotes by Don DeLillo

"Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain."

"I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."

"People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power."

"A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain."

"She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski."

"Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death."
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