Quotes About Time

Once you got that old, you might as well be ninety-eight or a hundred and eight. Nothing left for the world to show you but the latest incarnations of cruelty.

The sky was a sheet of slate but it was still warm, an August afternoon that let you know its kind was running out.

the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude

Stickups were chops - they cook fast and hot, you're in and out. A stakeout was ribs - fire down low, slow, taking your time.

Some kids rebelled to get attention. I did stupid things very carefully, spending all of my time thinking of ways to engineer small stupid things without getting caught. Things so small that no one else could see them and only I knew about them. But there I was last night, being stupid in a group, and of course that broke my rules and look where it got me.

Things are happening too fast for her to convince herself that she does not need time to think, to get to the bottom of things.

Sometimes when you had your head down in the [ice cream] vats, time stopped. The swirling white mist stalled in the air, hanging like ribbons. All sound dropped out, the whirring of the blender and the radio, and even the static-y buzz of your own thoughts. I don't know where I went during these spells. They only lasted a few moments yet they contained a little scoop of the infinite, a waffle-perfumed eternity.

It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun.

Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder--which is the general trajectory--and that was a nice couple of days.

She flickered then, as Ruby had that morning, and he saw her as she was on that rainy afternoon under his umbrella: almond-shaped dark eyes under long lashes, delicate in her pink cardigan, edges of her mouth upturned at one of her strange jokes. Unaware of the effect she had on people. On him, all these years later.

A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.

Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker's code, the concept of weekend.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.

The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.

The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure.