Quotes About Time

I know that things can't stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

Houses made of houses within houses made of time.

John Crowley

But will she come in time? Oh yes just in time; whenever she comes is just in time; when we have despaired for the thousandth midnight of any such a one ever coming from anywhere, she will arrive, in a tearing hurry, breaking into or out of the last spheres of air, fire, water, earth as though throwing open the successive doors of a long corridor, down which she rushes, her hair streaming and her brow knit, her hand already beside her mouth to call into the ear of our souls Wake up.

How long is the Tale? she had asked, and Mrs. Underhill had said: you and your children and your children's children will all be buried before that Tale's all told.

It's as though," Daily Alice said, "each day is like a step, and every step takes you further away from—well, from when things made more sense. When things were all alive, and made signs to you. And you can no more not take a step farther away than you could not live through a day." "I

What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?

What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you're young, the world seems young. That's all.

Already he found himself forgetting that something like an occluded front seemed to have swept over his memories of Sylvie, which he had thought as hard and changeless as anything he owned, but which when he touched them now seemed to have turned to autumn leaves like fairy gold, turned to wet earth, staghorn, snails' shells, fauns' feet.

Kids spell love T-I-M-E.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air the punk rock movement made sense.

There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

Natural units tell us that in a well-defined sense the Universe is very old already, about 1060 Planck times old. Life on Earth didn't appear until after the Universe was 1059 Planck times old. We were a late arrival.

But, as powerful mathematicians like Minkowski and Hilbert found striking harmony between their pure mathematical results and the workings of the physical world, many found the claims for such a harmony hard to resist. Thus, in the early years of the twentieth century, we begin to see why Minkowski's application of complex numbers to the description of space and time was hailed by one physicist as 'one of the greatest revolutions in our accepted views'.

We have seen that the process of stellar alchemy takes time – billions of years of it. And because our Universe is expanding it needs to be billions of light years in size if it is to have enough time to produce the building blocks for living complexity. A universe that was only as big as our Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, would be little more than a month old.

The effect of the 'time becomes space' proposal is that there is no definite moment or point of creation. In more conventional quantum mechanical terms we would say that the universe is the result of a quantum mechanical tunneling process, where it must be interpreted as having tunneled from nothing at all. Quantum tunneling processes, which are familiar to physicists and routinely observed, correspond to Transitions which do not have a classical path.

Marital life cannot be easily represented in art because it is the small, invisible, quotidian growth of the day-to-day, where outwardly nothing happens. Romantic love is like a general who knows how to conquer but not how to govern once the last shot is fired. Unlike the aesthete, who knows how to 'kill time' , married people master time without killing it. Marital time is about the wise use and governance of time, setting one's hands to the plough of the day-to-day.

Please not yet. Those are the three eternal words. Please not yet.

A man has no right to occupy another man's time unnecessarily

The future doesn't exist. It hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist. It has already happened.

It's not the last day that matters the most. It's the ones in between. The ones you get the chance to look back on. They're the carnation days. They may not stand out the most at first, but they stay with you the longest.

Patience is inversely proportional to the distance from the front of the queue.

Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.

Mathematicians call it "the arithmetic of congruences." You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o'clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o'clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ? 5 (mod 12), pronounced "eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.