Quotes About Time

He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he's fifty, and even then there's still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.

Our time together is drawing short, my reader. Possibly you will view these pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care. Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens to words.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time.

What do you want me to do?" he whispers into the empty air. It's hard to know. Oh Jimmy, you were so funny. Don't let me down. From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story. I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you.

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities.

So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex. "Don't even think about it," he tells himself. Sex is like drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.

It's wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There's nothing to be accomplished by it.

To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don't have much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.

He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.

There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. there will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction. These things sneak up on him for no reason, flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

Now, it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as we once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of year ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.

This could be the last time I have to wait. But I don't know what I'm waiting for. What are you waiting for? they used to say. That meant Hurry up. No answer was expected. For what are you waiting is a different question, and I have no answer for that one either.

I feel my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

All that wasted time, and he didn't even know who'd wasted it.

That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.

A space-time, between here and now and there and then, puncuated by dinner

I shiver: whose feet are walking on my grave? Time, I plead to the air, just a little more time. That's all I need.

And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.