Quotes About Time

That way if they were disappointed or disgusted with her, she'd only have to live with that reaction for a couple of months.

Nothing could stay perfect, but if you were lucky and diligent, you could steal a few perfect moments in your life.

Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

Fuck off, some of them seem to be yelling at coalition forces. A lot hinges on the appropriate military response. Fuck you might be risky. OK, off we fuck, then might buy some valuable time.

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.

as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise?

When the book was published, I had just turned sixty-one. I am writing this at a moment when, according to my doctors, I cannot be certain of celebrating another birthday.

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think — made me think for many years — that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

Also, ordinary expressions like "expiration date" … will I outlive my Amex?

every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less

Kierkegaard so shrewdly observes, one is condemned to live it forward and review it backward.

But the Seventies were only the Seventies because they had to have a name. Nullity and anticlimax appeared to close in on all sides.

My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

I know what's coming you see. I know no one beats these odds and I know it's a matter of getting used to that and realizing that you are expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way; and try not to do anything ghastly to your fellow creatures.

I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. ... Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave.

Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.

But George is getting old. Won't it very soon be too late? Never use those words to George. He won't listen. He daren't listen. Damn the future. Let Kenny and the kids have it. Let Charley keep the past. George clings only to Now. It is Now that he must find another Jim. Now that he must love. Now that he must live....

Never mind. Never mind. In this brief life, one cannot always be counting the cost.

To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean.

After many a summer dies the swan.

The pension was run by a happy-go-lucky Englishman, who used to laugh at my industry and tell me I ought to go swimming, while I was still young. "After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?