Quotes About Time

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.

Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Daß es so weiter geht, ist die Katastrophe. Sie ist nicht das jeweils Bevorstehende sondern das jeweils Gegebene.

It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns.

A verdadeira imagem do passado perpassa, veloz. O passado só se deixa ficar, como imagem que relampeja irreversivelmente, no momento em que é reconhecido.

The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame that is his story.

Articolare storicamente il passato non significa conoscerlo <>. Significa impadronirsi di un ricordo come esso balena nell'istante di un pericolo.

la función que tiene la memoria es la de proteger las impresiones, mientras que el recuerdo apunta a su disolución. La memoria es en esencia conservadora, en tanto que el recuerdo intenta destruir".

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize "how it really was." It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.

Who said, 'All Time's delight Hath she for narrow bed; Life's troubled bubble broken'? --- That's what I said.

Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour…

You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?

It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.

Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and that the future might be kinder. Well, sometimes the future is kinder, but it is never the same thing as the past.

Things that matter in the morning somehow don't matter in the afternoon.

He also noted that the veins of humans narrow with age, but the springs and rivers of the earth continually enlarge their channels.30

I'm not sure," Atkinson replied. "Maybe six months." It was a wildly optimistic assessment, but also a motivating one.

Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after.

He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.