Quotes About Time

On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information.

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.

In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.

We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.

Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

I wondered if Ivan was asleep. It was terrible to think that he was in this city, possibly very nearby, but I couldn't see him or talk to him because he didn't love me. I couldn't be with him for one minute, not even for the weird leftover hours that nobody else wanted, like from one to three a.m. on a Wednesday.

The hours I had spent like that, making my fingers simper at each other. 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.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick facades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

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. 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.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?

Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.

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.

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

There was the golden age, the years our children were nine, ten, eleven. Fourth and fifth grade....of course you never realize it's the golden age until it's over.

You're young," Mallory says. "And the worst thing about being young is not being able to appreciate that you're young because you aren't old enough to know any better.

be present and celebrate the holiday instead of wishing it over. After all, one is given only a certain number of Christmases in one's life.

Time remains a mystery to Margaret. A game of Monopoly can consume an afternoon, and an hour on the treadmill seems like forever. But a lifetime passes in an instant.

What am I going to do now? Then I realized this was the perfect time to start journaling again. Because if you don't write down what happens in a day, you forget—and that day becomes a blur and that blur becomes your life.

What does it take to know a person? Time. It takes time.

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

However, deep down, Brenda suspected that it was the stolen nature of those two hours that transformed them. She was supposed to be somewhere else... She had set aside those two hours - three, if you counted the driving - to be of service to her sister. The fact that Vicki had unexpectedly granted her leave gave those two hours a rarefied quality. What Brenda had thought was, I'd better not waste them. And, like magic, the words had come. The pages had filled.