Quotes About Time

Living in the Moment

To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late.

He knew she needed time to sort the problem out in her mind. Because he was such a patient man, he decided to give her an hour or two to agree. He thought he was being very courteous, and cautioned himself against letting such consideration become a habit.

The young fought sleep, she thought, but the old relished it, and at the moment, she felt absolutely ancient.

Good time management is not about buying a great calendar or planner. It is not about learning tricks to move faster, or about doing everything with mechanical efficiency. It's about creating days that are meaningful and rewarding to you, and feeling a sense of satisfaction in each and every one of your tasks.

If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after-if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice-if we could choose to remain suspended on time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep-would we slip, or would we choose the amber?

There are moments when the filament of time bends, loops, blurs. The present becomes permeable; the past leaps forward and insists itself upon us without warning. The orderly progression of our days reveals itself to be a lie, and the sense making brain flounders. What was he supposed to call this impossibility that insisted itself before him as reality? A hallucination? Deja vu, that cheap cinematic trick of the mind?

Life, oblivious to his grief, continued

It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.

Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea -- that was another time, a different year.

One of us continues to swim back and forth in her lane long after everyone else has gotten out, and when we call out her name - Alice, time's up! - the lifeguard lifts his hand and says, quietly, One more lap.

And at three o'clock in the morning, as they lie beside us peacefully slumbering away, we wake up in a cold sweat, cheeks flushed, teeth clenched, hearts pounding, wondering: How many more laps do we have left? One hundred? One thousand? Six? Ninety-four? Isn't there somebody out there who can give us a clue?

It was 10:30 in the morning and I was already running behind. This is hardly unusual, but it pisses me off every single time.

The thing I keep learning about endings is that they aren't a long time coming, and that they don't sneak up on you either, because endings just don't happen.

looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. Way too early

Some broken things you can't mend. Some you have to put together very slowly piece by fragile piece, waiting until the last bit of work is strong enough before you try the next. It takes a lot of patience.

There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.

The day before you died was the longest, slowest day ever. It gave you more time than you could possibly want to contemplate all the things you'd got wrong, the chances you'd missed, the errors you'd made. It was long enough to convince the most hopeful person that there was no point in anything.

cherish what you have, for in an instant it can be gone. And when it's gone, let the memory not be a weight that drags you down, but a bright light leading you forward.

Faolan launched himself across the bridge, uttering a prayer to any deity that might be prepared to listen. Let me reach her in time, let her keep hold, let this wretched apology for a bridge not crumble under my feet...

In time, your spirit will be with them again, perhaps in a great, spreading tree that shades the place where your grandchildren play. Maybe in a wide-winged eagle soaring aloft, watching as your dear one spreads her linen on the hawthorns to dry and looks suddenly to the sky, shading her eyes against the sunlight. You will be there, and they will know.

The dark things that never go away, the sunny, precious things that go all too soon.

It is no wonder women have a reputation for patience which is not shared by men. We spend so much of our time waiting. Waiting for a child to be born. Waiting for a man to come home, from the fields, from the sea, from battle. Waiting endlessly for news. That can be the worst, as fear bites deep at the vitals, and seizes the heart with chill fingers. The mind can make strange and horrible pictures, while you are waiting.

I could not bear his expression. That look said, this is a long good-bye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.