Quotes About Time

They were expressions of who he was and what he'd become, and he couldn't do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again.

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.

The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That's what the whole thing is about. And we can't stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I'm not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not.

La música sentimental tiene la especial cualidad de llevarte hacia atrás en el tiempo a la vez que te lleva hacia delante, y por eso te sientes nostálgico y esperanzado a la vez.

I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.

It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn't long enough for a transformation of that magnitude.

So, yes, of course I feel nostalgic, even if I am longing for a time which never really belonged to us: like I said, some things were better, some were worse, and the only way one can ever learn to understand one's own youth is by accepting both halves of the proposition.

sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.

I can see everything once it's already happened--I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

Don't you ever have conversations where someone took a wrong turn at some point, and then it goes on and on and it becomes too late to put things right?

I can see everything once it's already happened—I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three, even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. (What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.)

Pero lo que resultaba raro a su edad era que uno se pasaba la mitad del tiempo soñando con lo que podía suceder y la otra mitad intentando no pensar en eso, y en ambos casos uno se encontraba aprisionado en un periodo vital que no parecía importar demasiado, a mitad de camino entre la infancia y lo que implicara la madurez consolidada. (...)Y tal vez eso no tuviera ningún futuro, pero era un presente, y en eso consiste la vida.

Fifteen years was a long time in the life of a woman, though, when those fifteen years had been disappointing.

la música sentimental tiene la especial cualidad de llevarte hacia atrás en el tiempo a la vez que te lleva hacia delante, y por eso te sientes nostálgico y esperanzado a la vez.

Era un po' come se avessimo avuto davanti a noi un piatto strapieno e avessimo mangiato tutto in un lampo, e non era avanzato niente. Forse è così che le coppie resistono: evitando di abbuffarsi. Sanno che quel che hanno davanti deve durare a lungo, così lo centellinano. Anche se spero che la ragione non sia questa. Spero che, quando due persone stanno bene insieme, sia come se qualcuno continuasse a riempirgli il piatto.

She understood Paul from the inside out, two kids, nine or ten parents' evenings, eleven or twelve Christmases, eight or nine holidays in France, five seasons of The Wire, however many hundred fucks and takeaways. (Could it be thousands? Four figures if you added the fucks and the takeaways together, probably, although there was no earthly reason why you would.)

la musica sentimentale ha un grande potere: ti riporta indietro nel momento stesso in cui ti porta avanti, così che provi, contemporaneamente, nostalgia e speranza.

It's just that in the old days, when you eventually got your pictures back from the drugstore, you never went backward through time. You shuffled through the twenty-four holiday snapshots, only seven of which were any good, put them in a drawer and forgot about them.

Hay gente que nunca fue más allá de los sesenta, o que no fue más allá de la guerra, o no más allá de aquella noche en que el grupo en el que tocaban actuaron como teloneros de los Rolling Stones en el Marquee, y luego se han pasado el resto de la vida caminando para atrás; yo nunca llegué a ir más allá de Charlie. Fue con ella cuando me ocurrió lo más importante, las cosas que aún me definen.

People who were born in '66 are nearly fifty? I know the show's fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I'd have guessed that Tim was twenty-five for thirty.

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created.

Maybe the best thing to do with favourite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

I fell in love when I was twenty-six. Love in my interpretation comes once in a lifetime.