Quotes About Time

The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx xxx The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia...

If man had the wisdom of age in youth and the vitality of youth in age, then he would be an eternally wise young man. (Feb 2003)

In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it's one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn't know you possessed. Or maybe not.

My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead.

Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.

You just got sprung. Nig Rosewater out there? Clete asked. Nig Rosewater hasn't been up at this hour since World War II.

At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

At least those were the perceptions of an aging man whose retrospective vision was probably no more accurate today than it was when he was young.

It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better," I said.

I wasn't interested in trying to explain how the measure of one's life finally reduces itself to the possession of the moment, then the moment after that, moving through each of them in sequence from day to day, letting go of yesterday and asking nothing from the future except to be there for it.

Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life," the sheriff said. "He also said he never took his own advice.

was learning that when you get close to death, you'll trade everything you own for one more day on earth.

Certain kinds of loss are forever. Not many people understand that.

If age brings either wisdom or answers to ancient questions, it has made an exception for me.

spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the

He knows things don't happen in order, like past, present, and future.

How did a man know when it was his time? The answer is simple. There comes a moment when you no longer resist the inevitable and you accept the fact that billions have preceded you and that your death is not more important than theirs.

How did a man know when it was his time? The answer was simple. There comes a moment when you no longer resist the inevitable and you accept the fact that billions have preceded you and that your death is not more important than theirs.

But please don't be taken aback. Age is not kind, and it leaves a mean stamp on an elderly man's perceptions.

But the past is the past, and you don't get it back.

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was far greater than any theft of my goods or money.

But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past. The warning call from Wally

but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.

that indeed there is no greater theft than that of time.