Quotes About Time

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

Don't clap too loudly—it's a very old world.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --

No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

That's it then, is it? What was it all about? When did it begin?

Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything ... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more ... the endless time of never coming back ... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia

GUIL And a syllogism: One, he has never known anything like it. Two, he has never known anything to write home about. Three, it is nothing to write home about. . . . Home . . . What's the first thing you remember? ROS Oh, let's see . . . The first thing that comes into my head, you mean? GUIL No—the first thing you remember. ROS Ah. (Pause.) No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago.

ALEXANDER (cont.):     How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

Siempre el pasado llega y se va sin importarle lo que deja.

Yet time is one of God's most precious gifts to us. It is the most significant nonrenewable resource at our disposal. We have less of it remaining with each passing day. When God gave this gift, He intended for us to use it carefully, intentionally, wisely, and productively.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

You been gone too long, Sula. Not too long, but maybe too far.

The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.