Quotes About Time

If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.

I'm fine, said Pilar, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.

I suppose it's everyone's fate to be reduced to quaintness by those younger than themselves.

While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

Thus the time passed. Toby stopped counting it. In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it's a sea on which you float.

Fear is synonymous with the future, and the future consists of forked roads, I should say forking roads, because the roads are forking all the time, like slow lightning. A road is a process, not a location.

The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother's. I've passed them on. Decades ahead, you'll study your own temporary hands, and you'll remember. Don't cry, this is what happens.

She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

with shrunken fingers we ate our oranges and bread, shivering in the parked car; though we know we had never been there before, we knew we had been there before.

The bell that measures time is ringing

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.

They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

The rest of his life. How long that time had once felt to him. How quickly it has sped by. How much of it has been wasted. How soon it will be over.

What pays for all this? Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition.

But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.

Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.