Russell Baker Quotes

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

All things deteriorate in time.

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

That could stay, not forever, because we believe that nothing exists that is forever, not even the dinosaurs, but if well maintained, it could remain for four to five thousand years. And that is definitely not forever.

It is better to rust out than wear out.

Make sure that they do not break anything because we are coming back in 4 years

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

History can just be so unkind as time passes.

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

Sometimes when you mend a chain, the place where you fix it is strongest of all... Never was a chain that couldn't be broken. Sometimes its even a good idea.

Everything that comes together falls apart.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

Things break all the time. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Promises break. Hearts break.

Words and feathers the wind carries away.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.