Quotes About Time

And then there is the inevitable third stylisation—of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction.

Qué vanidad tan curiosa es la que impulsa al presente a esperar que el pasado se amamante de él.

I don't envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction.

Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .

drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. This

characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends.

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?

Chi poteva sapere come l'avrebbe pensata, il futuro? Ci aspettiamo troppo dal domani, sperando che sappia contrastare l'oggi.

Professional critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody is living in it rent free, but even so, surely it is, well, you know… time?

His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterised. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty to see himself as he had once been. Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.

They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. Margaret's

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got.

Later—well, what came later, came later.

They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage.

Things were just as they had been a moment before, and yet somehow the tone and substance had changed.

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

Fear did rather play havoc with one's self of time.

One of heartbreak's chief qualities seemed to be its ability to distort time and distances.

A nondescript place, but it had inevitably changed over the years; one of the old oaks had been split by lightning and now lay on its side, and the others had grown into behemoths around their fallen comrade.

Time seemed to elongate like honey dripped from a spoon.

One minute with her is better than a lifetime with anyone else.

Everything has a rhythm, Moncrieffe couldn't help but think, watching. The sea, our breathing, our anguish, our love. We couldn't endure the force of any of it all at once.

Time took on a peculiarly viscous quality.