Quotes About Time

A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.

We remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty roots and deep earth, in the echo and stories, the songs of the time and place we have inhabited. My clan, my blood, my place, my people.

As it's told, it is altered, as all stories are in the telling, by time, will, perception, faith, love, work, by hope, decrepit, imagination, fear, history and the thousand other variable powers that play upon our personal narratives.

Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there is something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and here.

You count the names of the missing as you count off time

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

I can't ask you to change," her husband said. "People only change if you give them time.

He could see time lying on the world like a sheen, a frozen blur of movement chopped out of context and painted onto the surface of the cold stone like alien shellac.

People who waste time naming never have time for living.

History's kaleidoscope worked its permutations, its pace ever faster, approaching some unknown crescendo.

Time had a way of making passion into work. He had what he wanted. He had his dream. He had to live it and breathe it and do its budget.

To the truly old, time was as thin as air, a keening and destructive wind that erased their pasts and attacked their memories.

Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act.

In fact the best plan would have you wintering in the Bahamas, spend hurricane season in DR and PR, the next winter in the Virgins, Leewards and Windwards, the next summer in Venezuela and the third winter in Trinidad. Now you've got lots of time.

Stephen Colbert still mourns. "Grief," he said, "will always accept the invitation to appear. It's got plenty of time for you.

Everybody, no matter how old you are, is around 24, 25 in their heart.

If you are gone [from your homeland] for fifteen years, you will not return. Even if you return, you will not return.

And yet, it is true that the third attractor doesn't look very attractive. It requires too much care, too much attention, too much time, too much diplomacy. Even today it is the Global that shines, that liberates, that arouses enthusiasm, that makes it possible to remain so unaware, that emancipates, that gives the impression of eternal youth. Only it does not exist. It is the Local that reassures, that calms, that offers an identity. But it does not exist either.

Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.

I did not have enough courage to go round to the back of the villa. I should certainly have been noticed by someone. Why in spite of this, did I have the feeling of having been there already–a long time ago? Don't we infact know in advance all the landscapes we see in our life? Can anything occur that is entirely new, that in depths of our being, we have not anticipated for a long time?

For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.

One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little grey old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs – faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discoloured and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky.

Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes.

They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies.