Quotes About Time

Why honey, don't you want to get dressed? My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon. I'm writing a novel, I said. I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

There was a beautiful time...

I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Why do you make our case (which is hell enough, and we have enough to test us in these coming cruel years) so utterly and absolutely rigid? I can take the even harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

My hours are married to shadow.

beating time along the edge of thought.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint.

It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain Ã¢â'¬Â¦ remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

This month is fit for little. The dead ripen in the grapeleaves. A red tongue is among us. Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another. Dog-head, devourer: Feed me the berries of dark. The lids won't shut. Time Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun its endless glitter. I must swallow it all. Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat- Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds? In this light the blood is black. Tell me my name.

Let me not be sentimental, let the distance in time give me humor and irony and a shrewd, if loving, eye.

You inherit white heather, a bee's wing, Two suicides, the family wolves, Hours of blankness.

The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.

Waiting for the right wonderful person is so much more important than getting the outer comforts of marriage at an early age.