Quotes About Time

I slumped down in the easy chair. 'You've been dead for two hundred years, Henry,' I said. 'I'm fairly certain you can't murder someone who's already dead.' If you could, I thought, the Met would have a form for it.

But as the wise man said, life's too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.

the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do "paperwork" and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.

All I do, really, is go to work and try to be professional, be on time and be prepared.

I kinda see my current position like this: Here's your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before 'Chuck Woolery' rings the bell.

Despise not any man, and do not spurn anything; for there is no man who has not his hour, nor is there anything that has not its place.

The past will become the future. The future will become the past.

We're like the hands of a clock...chasing and escaping each other, losing and finding each other, around and around, again and again, joined way down at the root, no matter how far apart.

This is a thing that I'm sure is obvious to everyone else but is never-endingly astonishing to me: that every change, every life, consists of nothing but a series of days.

Walter Benjamin's conviction that the past contains within it an orientation toward its own redemption, that what he called the "time of now" is "shot through with chips of Messianic time." (Kenneth Rexroth used the same word: "scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive.") If eternity, all the past and every future, flits through every moment, then we can grab it there.

What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?

But no escape is possible. Capital shrinks space, compresses time.

This is perhaps a more useful way to think about the shape of time—not as a line or an arrow or a circle or a spiral, but something living, a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off. "The world is always new," wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, "however old its roots.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, chief astronomer of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory, who innovated the sale of time

I accept that one day, my music will be gone forever. So will the Sistine Chapel, Bruce Lee movies, and all the silly arts and crafts my aunt ever bought. Gone with the wind. Making songs is something I do here and now. Because light captured is just a moment, a flicker.

I highly recommend enforced boredom as a way to develop your imagination. But don't take my advice; listen to Neil Young. He said it best: "There's a lot to learn for wasting time.

But don't take my advice; listen to Neil Young. He said it best: "There's a lot to learn for wasting time.

How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.

Work as if you were to live a thousand years, play as if you were to die tomorrow.

Fish and visitors smell in three days.

They say time will make all this go away. But it's time that's taken my tomorrow, and turned them into yesterday.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

When it is light and one can see the cogs of the monstrous clock go round and the springs unwind one thinks of people as a part of this mechanism. And so people grow vague in one's mind and unhuman or only half-human.

But I like the fog because it slows things up. Things are too damn fast to suit me. I like 'em slow. Like they used to be a century ago.