Quotes About Time

Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One

We have made a tradition out of mourning the passing of things we never had time really to know, just as we have made a culture out of the open road, out of movement without place.

Dutton describes a process of westernization of the perceptions that has to happen before the West is beautiful to us. You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.

And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of rock. It

And as he came he saw that it was spring,A time abhorrent to the nihilistOr searcher for the fecund minimum.

To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Aún no habías nacido cuando los árboles eran cristal ni has nacido ahora, en esta vigilia dentro de un sueño.

The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound

The soul, o ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind. A bronze rain from the sun descending marks The death of summer, which that time endures

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow.

All history is modern history.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

part together. This struck me as important. But 2 percent is always alive. From a certain microbiological standpoint, trees are immortal. I think history is like this. We cannot capture much more than the trees do of what is living about history. The rest is solid cortex. It stands and is of use to the living part.

Real life is the present moment—not the memories of the past which is dead and gone, nor the dreams of the future which is not yet born. One who lives in the present moment lives the real life, and he is happiest.

Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.

Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gathered, it is the fourth of Seventh-month,

My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,I laugh at what you call dissolution,And I know the amplitude of time.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age—I and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road.