Quotes About Time

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

Even if things were the same, people's perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter.

All he could do was wait like this, patiently, until it grew light out and the birds awoke and began their day. All he could do was trust in the birds, in all the birds, with their wings and beaks.

It was the first time he had seen her smile. It was the faintest of smiles, yet he felt the tides start to shift all over the world. He knew it was happening.

Just because there's an end doesn't mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence.

I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.

His heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small restless body.

It's really difficult to talk about dead people, but it's even harder to talk about dead young women. It's because from the time they die, they'll be young forever. On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older. Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one hour to the next. It's a terrible thing, but that's reality.

That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

Everybody's gotta die sometime. But until then we've still got fifty-some odd years to go, and a lot to think about while we're living those fifty years, and I'll just come right out and say it: that's even more tiring than living five thousand years thinking about nothing. Don't you think?

Yet what was time, when you got right down to it? We measured its passage with the hands of a clock for convenience's sake. But was that appropriate? Did time really flow in such a steady and linear way? Couldn't this be a mistaken way of thinking, an error of major proportions?

There's not much you can do about time - it just keeps on passing.

As Pushkin put it: He had no itch to dig for glories deep in the dirt that time has laid.

It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short. (...) If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.

Things cultivated over such a long time don't just vanish into nothingness.

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

I'm not cool and collected, and I'm not always doing things at my own pace. It's just a question of balance. I'm just good at habitually shifting the weight I carry around from one side of the fulcrum to the other, distributing it. Maybe this strikes others as cool. But it isn't an easy operation. It takes more time than it seems. And even if I do find the right balance, that doesn't lessen the total weight one bit.

This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven't happened. And often things aren't what they seem.

The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor.

For a while is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting. And probably is a word whose weight is incalculable.

We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

The past and the present, might we say, go like this . The future is a maybe . Yet we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us fair, we only come up with another indefinite maybe . The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.

You don't get it, do you? Person A understands Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A. (...) it's not a mistake, most people would call that love, if you think you want to understand me.

What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.