TIME QUOTES XIV

quotations about time

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

JULIAN BARNES

The Sense of an Ending

Tags: Julian Barnes


Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away, but which nevertheless will make at the end of it, no small deduction from the life of man.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

The Cave

Tags: José Saramago


The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend.

DAVID GERROLD

Under the Eye of God

Tags: David Gerrold


The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

HORACE

Epistles


Man seems to be deficient in nothing so much as he is in time.

ZENO

attributed, Day's Collacon


There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.

DEAN KOONTZ

Forever Odd

Tags: Dean Koontz


Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

Einstein's Dreams

Tags: Alan Lightman


Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular -- an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Sexing the Cherry

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.

J. M. COETZEE

In the Heart of the Country

Tags: J. M. Coetzee


Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.

JAMES BALDWIN

If Beale Street Could Talk

Tags: James Baldwin


Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.

GREGORY BENFORD

Furious Gulf

Tags: Gregory Benford


Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

The Golden Legend

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?

K. J. PARKER

The Escapement

Tags: K. J. Parker


Time as he grows old teaches all things.

AESCHYLUS

Prometheus Bound

Tags: Aeschylus


Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Troilus and Cressida

Tags: William Shakespeare


Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.

JEAN DE LA BRUYERE

attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine


The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The Countess Cathleen

Tags: William Butler Yeats


But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Fellowship of the Ring

Tags: J. R. R. Tolkien


And now, Lord, these things are passed by, and time hath assuaged my wound.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

Tags: St. Augustine