Permanence Quotes

“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,' he says. 'I wouldn't hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desire that kind of permanence all the same.”
― Hilary Leichter, Temporary

“Once, we built structures entirely from the most durable substances we knew: granite block, for instance. The results are still around today to admire, but we don’t often emulate them, because quarrying, cutting, transporting, and fitting stone require a patience we no longer possess.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“What is the end of Fame? 't is but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their 'midnight taper,'
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.”
― Lord Byron, Don Juan

“People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

“Everything is new and doomed.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I had never wanted permanence before, not really, or I had wanted my freedom more; I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt's King
Cheops erected the first pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other rummaging,
Burglariously broke his coffin's lid:
Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.”
― Lord Byron, Don Juan

“I built myself a house of glass:
It took my years to make it:
And I was proud. But now, alas!
Would God someone would break it.

But it looks too magnificent.
No neighbour casts a stone
From where he dwells, in tenement
Or palace of glass, alone.”
― Edward Thomas

“Some people stay permanently in my heart!”
― Avijeet Das

“Every secret told, every declaration made, is a boundary crossed, a step taken into unknown country that can never be unstepped, never reversed, never erased.”
― Aidan Chambers, This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

“All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“States have collapsed, empires have disappeared, epochs ended, new eras have begun, but the Egyptian Pyramids are still standing! Why? Because those who built these pyramids had an endless desire to become a permanent part of eternity!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Verba volant, scripta manent.”
― Caius Titus

“Nothing was permanent, even discontentment.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“There is no one economy... There's a lot of economies that overlap with each other. And you can narrow or widen the scope of what you're assessing to look at a specific nation, a specific state, a specific group of people, a specific group of businesses or the entire earth as if it's a distinct entity. But really it's a convergence of entities and relationships; a multitude of economies.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“I love this life enough to mourn
what I miss when I am not myself, or,
when I am myself,
and there is nothing I can do about it.”
― Belle Townsend

“Stars flicker, flash, and fade like we do. They are born and torn apart by entropy, yet we once called them gods. Foolish is it not? Without knowing, we had called the most permanent concept of a being—stars.”
― H.S. Crow

“Why do people always have to be named after dead people? If they had to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas...?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Throughout my days on Earth, I have gone by a myriad of names. I seasonally got wind of epithets such as a rootless strider, a hammer lacking a head, a trampled idealist, and in most instances a hopeless dreamer. And yet: One cannot bring a fantasist back to ground by such utterings. Words for him are like indistinct silhouettes above a sea. Seagulls that disappear into a morning fog. They will erode like statues of stone and abate like the men who built them. A dreamer’s hope can only succumb at the dawn of a more brilliant, precious one.”
― Vladimir Hlocky, Journeys Beyond Earth

“There was even a scrap of poetry he treasured which stated that a moving finger having once written could never be lured back to unwrite.”
― Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity

“Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sound of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude.

In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I am the body,
and I am the rocks in the pockets,
and I am the water.
There is no evading myself.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana

“Le paysage était devenu le décor du passage. La ruralité s'instituait en principe de résistance à cet emportement général.”
― Sylvain Tesson, On the Wandering Paths

“I did not believe in permanence until I couldn’t see a photo of me without your face in it.”
― Ramayana Roxas, At 23

“Then I walked down the Cours Belsunce. The nets were stretched out to dry. A couple of women mending them looked quite lost in the huge square. I had never seen them doing this before. I'm sure that I haven't seen most of the really important things that happen in this city. To see the things that matter, you have to feel that you want to stay. Cities shroud themselves from those who're just passing through. I picked my way carefully among the nets. The first stores were just opening, and the first newspaper boys were yelling the headlines.

The newspaper boys, the fishermen's wives on the Belsunce, the shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers going to work the early shift - they were all part of the masses who would never leave no matter what happened. The thought of leaving this place was as unlikely to occur to them as to a tree or a clump of grass.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“Never delay until tomorrow what you can resolve indefinitely today”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“And, well, I suppose that's partly why I don't have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn't guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning