Quotes About Time

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor

Time is the most valuable thing you have; be sure you spend it well

build one would think to be whirled lightly over an

We have but a short life to live here my dear friend. But let us make it long by noble deeds.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, How could you have believed that? because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower - as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly... All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind's machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we recognize this fact.

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laughs, and he calls his wife and says: Look, we are seeing something that ceased to exist millions of years ago—and she sees, exactly, and laughs with him.

Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for

The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.

We sleep our lives away.

she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she ws in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeming to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments or peaks, then nothing had happened to her for a long time; and she could look forward to nothing but a dwindling away from full household activities and getting old.

There were occasional cold moments when she thought that she must somehow, even now, check herself on the fatal slope towards marriage, somewhere at the back of her mind was the belief that she would never get married, there would be time to change her mind later. And then the thought of what would happen if she did chilled her.

Die Zeit nimmt auf niemanden Rücksicht, ob es uns nun gefällt oder nicht.

Could we have seen this efflorescence of stupidity? Yes, because every mass political movement unleashes the worst in human behaviour and admires it. For a time at least.

We said that when we read in the reports of their assemblies that Comrade Stalin had spoken for five hours and the applause lasted for half an hour, we were incredulous. In our culture – we boasted – there could not be this kind of reverence for a leader. In fact, the very word 'leader' was an embarrassment. Decades later, with what chagrin did I read, during the reign of Thatcher, 'wild applause for fifteen minutes'. Thus does Time punish our arrogances.

I would not be at all surprised to find out....personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by 'ageing', may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past - but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically.

Los viejos saben por experiencia que a veces los recuerdos se alteran y el sentido cambia

Tempus fugit. See fugitib nii, et vähe pole.