Quotes About Time

Ye gods! But you're not standing around holding it by the hand all this time. No. [...] [T]he dough takes care of itself. [...] While you cannot speed up the process, you can slow it down at any point by setting the dough in a cooler place [...] then continue where you left off, when you are ready to do so. In other words, you are the boss of that dough.

Was it a sign of Creeping Decrepitude?

Of course, an old wine is like an old lady, and traveling can disturb her.

When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye.

The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time

Te quiero... y me mueves el tiempo de mi vida sin horas.

we're all alive the day before we die ... but, how alive is another question.

At least pretend we have a standing date, someday, for that mother-son field trip we never got to take, thanks to Sam's draconian call sheets. He should've stayed on to run Italy itself. They'd be a superpower!

She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.

You have to live each hour as if it's your last and each day as if you were immortal. - Kate Sheffield

She'd met Colin on a Monday. She'd kissed him on a Friday. Twelve years later. She sighed. It seemed fairly pathetic.

341 days seems like an eternity when you can't see people you love.

And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.

When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again.

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.