Philip Roth Quotes

What comes will also go. What always is will alone remain.

Nothing that is can pause or stay.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

Nothing that is can pause or stay; / The moon will wax, the moon will wane, / The mist and cloud will turn to rain, / The rain to mist and cloud again, / Tomorrow be today.

There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.

There is nothing in the whole world which abides. All things are in a state of ebb and flow, and every shadow passes away. Even time itself, like a river, is constantly gliding away .

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.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

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

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

You can't halt time.

I know that everything comes to an end. Everything is a phase.

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be.

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.

In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight.

Forever is a long long time and time has a way of changing things.

You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty.

Everything is transient. Everything is constantly changing. The only thing we have is now.

No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Some things don't last forever, but some things do.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.