Quotes About Time

Some sentences release their poison only after years.

A modern man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.

One lives in the naive notion that "later" there will be more room than in the entire past.

Have you heard that terrifying expression "to kill time"? It's time that kills us, but we pretend it's the other way around!

People are only the phantoms of their memories.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

Pour retrouver l'amour, il faut libérer du temps psychique et du temps de disponibilité. Il faut s'ennuyer un peu.

Such are the ills of our time, which flounders between apocalypse and normalcy. Are we in a crisis, or aren't we?

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

I'm twenty-six," she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. "It isn't the age I feel like." "What age do you feel like?" "Nineteen -- like you." But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year -- maybe as many as seven years -- to learn to feel nineteen.

it was not a] circle—just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad. "That's so typical of your attitude," Svetlana said. "You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It's over two thousand years after his death, he's in Boston for the first time, they've named something after him—why should his first reaction be to get pissed off?

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get—you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities

The thing with the Rolexes is amazing, amazing, Ivan wrote. Light, he said, seemed to sweep, but quantum theory said it ticked. Waves were the combination of sweeping and ticking. Could true sweeping ever happen on this Earth of ours? Maybe one could do sweeping math, og sweeping sex. Sweeping was beautiful, but powerless. Energy came from ticking - the capacity for rapid change. Immortality was sweeping. Lives coming and going, generations, years, minutes, seconds: all are on the fake Rolex.

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time- the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that THAT was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.

There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover.

I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get--you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

What a beautiful girl you are," he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of "important" itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.

You have a lot of time, you don't need to be in a hurry." That's what the deans said, when you tried to take five classes. Easy for them: they were already deans. Either that was something they wanted to be doing, in which case they could afford to relax; or it wasn't what they had wanted to be doing, and now they were invested in preventing anyone else from accomplishing anything, either.

On Friday, I stood in front of the class singing "Hello, Goodbye" by the Beatles. It was like falling off a cliff: time stretched, there was so much time to think different thoughts. "You say yes, I say no," I sang. "You say stop, and I say go, go, go.

thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.