Writing has the power of permanence.

Permanence was a illusion, and nothin really mattered but now.

If you wipe a dirty spot off a wall you've removed it, but you haven't eliminated it. You're stuck with a dirty rag you didn't have before.

Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well--my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air.

He had lived without her before. He could get over it! In a year or so he'd be able to walk straight past her without his heart so much as missing a beat. He needed her as much as a drunk needs a cork! But he understood all too quickly how vain these thoughts were. How can you tear something out of your heart? Your heart isn't made out of paper and your life isn't written down in ink. You can't erase the imprint of years.

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...?

The old man blinked at the young lady, "You are seeking permanence.""I guess I am!

Had the love been permanent, there won’t have been divorces after love marriages. Had the love been everlasting, there won’t have been bad blood in the family.

The city is physical, concrete," Pedro [da Luz] said. "When we make a mistake, it is a mistake that will last for forty, fifty years. That's a problem.

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.