quotations about time
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was -- only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Address to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York City, December 5, 1961
The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Day by day Time rolls the scroll of Life,
Yet man heeds not in worldly strife
The vanished years, till Death demands his claim--
The mound-lines of the clay that mark his name.
HARRIET MAXWELL CONVERSE
"Day by Day"
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
Time loves a new lay; and the dirge he is playing
Will change for you soon to a livelier strain.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"You Will Forget Me"
Time is getting on.... Yes, bad luck to it. It always gallops when you want it to walk, and walks when you want it to gallop, like an ill-trained horse.
ROBERT BARR
The Victors
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
T. S. ELIOT
"The Dry Salvages", Four Quartets
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Advice To a Pool"
Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Guns of Avalon
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Conquest of Happiness
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence -- neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish -- it is an imponderably valuable gift.
MAYA ANGELOU
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
Our time's the most precious thing we've got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Saxophone Joe and the Woman in Black", The Ivory and the Horn
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time.
SUSAN GLASPELL
"Tickless Time"
When things don't please you, the best medicine is to swallow a little tincture of time.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Time begets more than fiction can create.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims