Quotes About Time

I've only got a handful of memories, and I don't want them wearing away, textures rubbing smooth, colors fading from overexposure. When I take them out, once in a blue moon, I need them bright enough to catch my breath and sharp enough to cut.

When you look at someone you knew when you were young, you always see the person you first met,

They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.

I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.

Something rippled round the table: a loosening, a settling, a long sigh too low to hear. Un ange passe, my French grandfather would have said: an angel is passing. Somewhere upstairs I heard the faint, dreamy note of a clock striking.

I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow's-feet from smiles I hadn't seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren't mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read.

I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn't give you time off for good behavior.

She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps.

knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn't a doctor; I'd already got the hang of the doctors' smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation.

In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they've zipped past you:

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories,

But if you've seen a dead body, you know how they change the air: that huge silence, the absence strong as a black hole, time stopped and molecules frozen around the still thing that's learned the final secret, the one he can never tell.

I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes),

If you want to kill someone, have enough respect for my time to make it someone, anyone, other than the most gobsmackingly obvious person in the world. One

I hope in that half hour she lived all her million lives.

My granddad was after dying the month before that, of a stroke. That took him four days. Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it's gone in a few sec- and, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don't like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They've no notions about their dying. It's a little thing, only, you'd get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox.

but Cal learned a long time ago never to underestimate the spectacular natural wonder that is people's stupidity.

Life feels like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it's gone in a few seconds, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don't like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They've no notions about their dying. It's a little thing, only; you'd get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox. Or a hay baler, or a propane tank.

Then the pints will get further apart, and then one of us will get into a relationship and won't be around as much; the texts will start with Hey, too long no see, and all of a sudden we'll realize it's been a year since we met up.

he had been lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women, desperate for some mystical rite that would reverse time and put their disintegrating private world back together.

Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head.

I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood.

The sun has started to slide down the sky.

Wir kannten uns, seit wir in Windeln gesteckt hatten, aber das war der Sommer, als sich alles veränderte, so schnell, dass wir nicht mehr mitkamen.