Quotes About Time

forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

in this country shadings of class resist time longer than differentials in age

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Truths about writing can be framed before you've published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it's too late to make any difference.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.

Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. [p. 66]

I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others. —

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?

I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.

Old love is a row of beach huts in November.

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.

Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.

To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.

Voleo bih da je život kao bankarstvo', rekao sam. 'Ne mislim doslovno. Ima tu vrlo komplikovanih stvari. Ali, na kraju sve shvatiš ako se samo potrudiš. Ili uvek postoji negde neko ko se razume, pa makar i naknadno, kad je ve? kasno. Nevolja sa životom, kako se meni ?ini, jeste da može ve? za sve da bude kasno, a da ti ipak i dalje ništa ne shvataš.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.

Io so una cosa per certo: che un tempo oggettivo esiste, ma che esiste anche quello soggettivo, quello che si porta sull'interno polso, proprio accanto alle pulsazioni cardiache. E questo tempo personale, che è poi anche quello autentico, si misura in funzione del nostro rapporto con i ricordi.

We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

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.