Quotes About Time

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused

My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before

If you imagined the human lifespan of sixty years was compressed to a day, then eighty million years would still be 3,652 years—older than the pyramids.

La vida es demasiado corta y el ADN demasiado largo.

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it. Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. To the earth...a million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time.

I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that. You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all. But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what's already been set in motion.

Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.

He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.' 'You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all.' 'But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.

What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around the pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows. That was the moment. There has been no other.

You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

Outside the house is a world where the shelves are stocked, where radio waves are full of music, where young men walk the streets again, men who have deprievation and a fear worse than death, who have willingly given up their early twenties and now, thinking of thirty and beyond, haven't any time to spare.

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Youth is the only sexy tragedy.

It's your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering among your rooms.

Per un momento sono semplicemente e completamente felici. Ci sono, proprio adesso, e sono riuscite, in qualche modo, nel corso di diciotto anni, a continuare ad amarsi. È abbastanza. In questo momento è abbastanza.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.

You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.