Quotes About Time

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time

We had fed the heart on fantasies. / The heart's grown brutal from the fare." From "Meditations in Time of Civil War," 1923.W.B.Yeats

A decrease in the amount of time required to search for a wine product lowers the opportunity cost of choosing to purchase it, and therefore gives wine consumers an economic incentive to buy more of it.

Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters. But then, so are diamonds.

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

There's also a great post from the Datadog team on visualizing time series data that is worth reading.

According to our chronology, [the creation of the world] fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of October in the year of the Julian Calendar, 710 [4004 b.c.e.].

For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love.

It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.

x. IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding

Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what's being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it's really very personal and specific.

Fabelhaft. Having the best fun ever. One thing at a time. Aspirins. Cold water from the minibar.

Nil sub sole novum [...] Qualsiasi azione, nella pienezza del tempo, sprofonda nel nulla.

Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it?" he said. I was silent, not knowing what to say. "I mean only—" rubbing his eye—"I only understand it, as I get older. How funny time is. How many tricks and surprises." The word trick was all I heard, or understood.

But how can you stand to stay asleep so much?" Harriet had once asked her sister curiously. Allison shrugged. "Isn't it boring?" "I only get bored when I'm awake.

Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time. The effects of time, visible and invisible.

And—oh, I don't know, stop me if I'm rambling…" passing a hand over his forehead.… "but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn't be an object. It'd be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.

But still I was young.

lo extraño era más bien descubrir en el presente un fragmento tan brillante del pasado vivo, dañado y erosionado pero no destruido.