Quotes About Time

In the same way, the universe would be out of energy by now if it had been running from all eternity.

It's also important to understand that the universe did not emerge from existing material but from nothing—there was no matter before the Big Bang. In fact, chronologically, there was no "before" the Big Bang because there are no "befores" without time, and there was no time until the Big Bang.

Is it, one wonders, only nostalgia that makes the music of the popular songs of that time seem more tuneful, the words more comprehensible, the feeling behind them more genuine than of any since? Certainly the dance music of the war years was enjoyed by all age groups, and respectable middle-aged citizens were not ashamed to be caught humming the hit tunes of the moment in those years when 'popular' music was truly popular.

What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was.

Poets talk about "spots of time," but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.

time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning

Thank you for the dear past.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it's only a matter of time.

I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation." —Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It's a mistake that never stops being made.

Every time period that's ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism 'May you live in interesting times' did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.

I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.

The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).

This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who's intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can't see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves.

Nobody ever talks about building a time machine in order to go back and kill Judas.

It took some time for Boomers to reach their "uncomfortable analysis" phase. This stands in contrast to Generation X, who entered that phase immediately and never left.

the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past]

It was not nostalgia for a time that was more wholesome. It was nostalgia for a time when you could relax and care less.

I always thought the time machine is the device that's missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that's the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it.

I will live forever, or at least until I'm forty-five.

But I've mellowed over time, which is what all wine drunks and dope smokers say when trying to justify why they quit trying.