Phil Elverum Quotes

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.

Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

Time stays, we go.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

A course never quite looks the same way twice. The combinations of weather, season, light, feelings and thoughts that you find there are ever-changing.

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.

It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

In this world of change, nothing which comes stays, and nothing which goes is lost.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

What's good for you one day will not necessarily still be good for you the day after.

Life is like this: things come and go.

I have seen lot of ups and downs in life; I have realised that nothing is permanent in life.

Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.

You can't halt time.

Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and then... of course, they're not.

I can't say I was consciously thinking of the big changes in the music business when I was writing the lyrics, but change, uncertainty, flux, impermanence - these are things I'm acutely aware of. And I enjoy facing it all.