Quotes About Time

Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried)

our lives couldn't be viewed with detachment until they were half forgotten, like paintings which can be seen objectively only when the artists are long dead

How big is a man's life? asked Ultan. I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that? You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been. I suppose that is why the depraved creatures who devour the bodies of the dead seek more.

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.

The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.

Nations are like men—growing old, never young. My son had the misfortune to be a young man of an old nation.

if a pauper were to leap from the parapet of this bridge each time we draw breath, we should live forever, because the city breeds and breaks men faster than we respire.

You're old when your dreams become regrets

It has been my good fortune–or evil fortune, as it may be–that the places with which my life has been largely associated have been, with very few exceptions, of the most permanent character.

There are men—I have known a good many—who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company. They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place. Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them. They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do. And, failing that, just trying to look busy.

pain … the chain forged to bind us to the eternal present, …

We meet and love, someone builds a tomb for us, perhaps. It does not matter—someone else will rob it, and the winds puff away our dust; then we shall be forgotten.

By the same argument, the life must reside in each joint of every finger, and surely that is impossible. How big is a man's life? asked Ultan. I have no way of knowing, but isn't it larger than that? You see it from the beginning, and anticipate much. I, recollecting it from its termination, know how little there has been.

All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us?

There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were married, but she still remembered that she loved me.

All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us? In sleep the mind is encircled by its time, which is why we so often hear the voices of the dead there, and receive intelligence of things to come.

We shut our eyes to the sky and the sea in the seventies—now in the nineties we open doors to a darker, nearer empire than either, the place that is between stones that touch, that has lived for fifty thousand years in the black guts of caves, for six thousand in the empty rooms of old houses; and one of the doors is the door in this wall of bricks.

This world that you and we treasure has now been driven round the sun so often that the warp and woof of its space grow threadbare and fall as dust and feeble lint from the loom of time.

The game is nearly over,' she whispered. 'That is what I came to tell you. Did you think it would go on forever?

You that read all of this in a year that I will never see will think me wretched, perhaps... But know this: The best and happiest of my hours you know nothing about. I have seen days like gold.

You think that time is a single thread. It is a weaving, a tapestry that extends forever in all directions.

The forest had set its own dead there as well, stumps and limbs that time had turned to stone, so that I wondered as I descended, if it might not be that Urth is not, as we assume, older than her daughters the trees, and imagined them growing in the emptiness before the face of the sun, tree clinging to tree with tangled roots and interlacing twigs until at last their accumulation became our Urth, and they only the nap of her garment.

The past cannot be found in the future where it is not

Until we reach the end of time, we don't know whether something's been good or bad; we can only judge the intentions of those who acted.