Quotes About Time

I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!

They say eyes clear with age, As dew clarifies air To sharpen evenings, As if time put an edge Round the last shape of things To show them there; The many-levelled trees, The long soft tides of grass Wrinkling away the gold Wind-ridden waves- all these, They say, come back to focus As we grow old. - Long Sight In Age

Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other things.

Caught in the center of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. I make a sharp reply, Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain Just in what jaws you were to suppurate: You may have thought things would come right again If you could only keep quite still and wait.

we should be careful of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there's my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Days What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.

Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so. — Philip Larkin, from "Reference Back," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

It had not done so then, and could not now

Behind the glass, underneath the cellophane, remains your final summer – sweet And meaningless, and not to come again.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary into what it is… a moment in time; an observed fragment of eternity.

with no morning the day is sold.

Qué libres somos cuando soñamos! Las barreras del tiempo, las limitaciones del espacio, las leyes de la lógica, las represiones de la conciencia... todo esto desaparece

The Incarnation is not about a God who steps in for a while to rescue a few souls from a godless world. It is a cosmic work of God in history that impacts the whole of creation for all time. Its particularity has consequences that are universal and eternal.

What actually happened in the past is gone- history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains.

They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.

the Basil Spence Syndrome. When Coventry Cathedral was going up and in the public eye, he went through a lean period when he wasn't offered any jobs at all because people thought he wouldn't have time for anything else.

We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

I love history, Tom. All those old things people dig up. Just ordinary things that were once used by ordinary people, but made special by time.

Ni ska bli en del av historien, eftersom historia är allt ni bryr er om.

How should I remember the child's name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics.