Quotes from Robert Grudin

We go to sleep, and time speeds by us like starlight, whisking us hours closer to the grave. Yet sleep rejuvenates; these lost hours slow down aging and keep us young; time running fast means that Time will run slow.

We are, paradoxically, unkind to the present, ignoring the opportunity to project it into the future, forgetting it as soon as it is past. As we would injure children by spoiling them, we injure time by being too attentive to its ephemera.

A monstrous fallacy of time, so ingrained that it is almost automatic, is the idea that we necessarily learn more and more about important human experiences as time passes.

Method is not (as we often think) subservient to goal but rather contains the goal within itself.

Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy.

The new is forever new, but our powers to appreciate it quickly weaken and age. The new is forever the same, but our language for understanding it changes with the shadows. The truth is forever the same, forever new.

Here lies the characteristic paradox of good and evil: for action, in terms of practical effects, is superior to inaction, and the congenitally active evil an can frequently win advantage over the sometimes inactive good. Indeed, the fundamentally stable and restful spirit of goodness is a lure to evil inspirations, an encouragement to villains who are aware that, in the moral and political chess game, they have the white pieces and the first move.

Free states characteristically attempt to restrain aggressive tyrannies through rational negotiation. Aggressive tyrannies understand the essential absurdity of such negation, but nonetheless participate in it with enthusiasm, knowing that it will camouflage their intentions and win them time. Negotiating with wronged people, one turns the subject of conversation from the correction of past wrongs to the prevention of future wrongs.

The strong are free to trust, the weak constrained to.

True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.

The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future.

The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.

Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.

Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.

The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.

Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.

The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention.

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.