Quotes About Time

Tess was carried along the wings of the hours

Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge.

Nature does not often say See! to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply Here! to a body's cry of Where?

It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.

After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them;

he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice

I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days!

reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease...

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,—'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!' … But

Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line—less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

Oh yes," she said, quickly. "I know all that. But don't talk of it—seven or six years—where may we all be by that time?" "They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past—much less than to look forward to now.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then!

Five years, nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years?

New love is brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth.

And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, 'Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!

a true narrative like time and tide must run its course and would respect no man.

an indefinite courtship soon injures a woman's position and credit, sooner than you think.' 'Baptista

In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, 'Here's your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am an old dial; and shiftiness is the best policy.

But loving is not done by months, or method, or rule, or nobody would ever have invented such a phrase as falling in love.

She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen and among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?

Proud Songsters The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were theirs. These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing, Which a year ago, or less than twain, No finches were, nor nightingales, Nor thrushes, But only particles of grain, And earth, and air, and rain.