Quotes About Time

All that at present can be said with certainty, is that, as with the individual, so with the species, the hour of life has run its course, ans is spent.

The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.

Well! this time next year, we will know all of which we are now ignorant.

Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever.

They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.

So she guessed you could word hard to make yourself who you wanted to be and yet find that the passing years had transformed you beyond your own recognition. End up disappointed in yourself, despite your best efforts.

When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.

But one day leads to another, and so on. No way around it. It's that merciless thing that time does.

I won't go into it any further, other than to say that year by year the world darkens down and things are always going away.

And they did what lovers often do when they think the future stretches out endless before them as bright as on the noon of creation day: they talked ceaselessly of the past, as if each must be caught up on the other's previous doings before they can move forward paired.

And she [Ada] thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life.

We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.

The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions. Except time flows one way and drags us with it no matter how hard we paddle upstream.

Remembering doesn't change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won't erase it either.

How very sad anniversaries become. They are for the young and hopeful and for the very old and hopeless. A spark of expectation reveals the gloomy, weary waste.

many of Bear's stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear's position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.

The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions.

When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.

Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.

In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?

She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing, in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again toward winter.

The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.

Time partially reconciles us to anything.

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.