Amy Sedaris Quotes

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.

What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.

The perfection in theater is that it's over the second it's done.

Theater is so wonderful and brilliant but it lasts very much in the moment. It's there and then it's gone.

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.

I guess because theater's so ephemeral and it's gone. You make this nightly contract with the audience and you redraw that contract for the next night, whereas film and television, it's forever. I suppose it's always about adopting personas, never about being yourself. I think they call it a "shy man's revenge."

Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone.

The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

It is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

Words writ in waters.

To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

I'm always interested in the unexpected and know that things, especially in show business, but in life generally, are inevitably fleeting to one extent.

Nothing is permanent. Not even the end of the world.

Days are coloured bubbles that float upon the surface of fathomless nights.

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones.

One never gets the same summer twice.

Dance is like life. It exists as you are flitting through it, and when it's over, it's done.

That flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

She seemed fragile like a moonflower – destined to bloom for a single lovely night, and then to fade and fall.

Nothing mortal is enduring, and there is nothing sweet which does not presently end in bitterness.

Commonplace objects are constantly changing… The pies, for example, we now see, are not going to be around forever. We are merely used to the idea that things do not change.