Quotes About Time

Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark.

Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones's most famous songs has it, it's because he's dead.

If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.

And then there is the extravagance of places where summer hardly has darkness and winter hardly has light, as though the light were gambled away or drunk down all in one long exhilarated draught that brings on the long darkness.

Marble lasts, but soil feeds.

Life is short, but it is wide. Genevieve Whitman taught me that.

Life is short, but wide.

How many years went by unnoticed, unembraced?

The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad, and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch still surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner . . .I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Life is short, but it is wide. This too shall pass.

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously

but it is not what one does so much as the way that while one does it time runs past forever.

Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present.

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

Time flies, but if I am willing to fly with it, then I can be airborne, too.

Of course, though, there can be treasures revealed in a conversation, whether we realize it or not at the time.

The curve of my spine was so elegant. I felt deeply moved that, in all the years of having these shoulders, this spine, this back, I had never noticed how it was a line of poetry—an overture to the magnificence of the human body. I realized in that moment that women have no clue about our own beauty; no clue about the connection between pleasure and time; no clue about this deep, delicious, endlessly replenishing source of divinity within each of us.

This is my favorite time of the day. Light and dark touch for a few moments. [...] I used to wish dusk would last longer, but its quickness seems to add to making it special.

De ontdekking van de toekomst is de ontdekking van het verleden.

Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more.

Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.

Te montrer à l'univers, le temps d'un éclair, puis m'enfermer avec toi, seul, et te regarder pendant l'éternité.

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.