Quotes About Time

Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn't even know where he's stored.

the time when any couple has found its balance, and passion has quieted from its early scream, but gratitude is still abundant; what no one realizes are the golden years.

Where was he? Somewhere in there he lost the first phase of youth, like the first phase of a rocket; it had fallen, depleted, behind him. And here was the second. And last. He swore he would not give it to anyone; he would enjoy it. He would enjoy it alone. But: how to live alone and yet not be alone?

I knew that not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever thought. Some have a harder chance. Some get no chance at all. With great sadness, I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy.

Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar. The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation. And now, Less says, it's unpoplar.

an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered

It's true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old.

We kept each other's stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant - which is the only definition of happiness I know.

What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth?

The beauty of his youth somehow taken from its winter storage and given back to him in middle age.

Like measles, love was the kind of thing you had to catch in youth, dispel, so that it would not leap upon you in old age and kill you.

Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink.

Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour?

Arthur Less's life with Robert ended around the time he finished reading Proust. It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less's life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish.

We waste so much time within ourselves.

Strange to be almost 50, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.

There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…to your final place of rest." He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men.

Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you'd never met but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room, despite everything; something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better.

THERE ALMOST HAS to be a heaven, so there can be a place where all things meet. Where time folds in, a lifted tablecloth after the meal, and gathers all the scattered crumbs of life.

Fate, that glockenspiel, will turn upon the hour.

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

It feels possible that memory will never be finished with this moment. Then they step apart.

It's true things can go on till you die. And people use the same old table, even though it's falling apart and it's been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother's. That's how towns become ghost towns. It's how houses become junk stores. And I think it's how people get old.