Quotes About Time

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made

Odd how many suffering members of humankind have faced eternity obsessed with their bowels, their bedsores, or the meagerness of their diets.

Time sure kicks the shit out of people...

Sounds like

Life is brutal that way... the loss of irrevocable moments amid trivia and distraction.

30,000 mornings, give or take, is all we're given.

I think about how we can't always live in the moment because moments pass, and when we're lucky, we have the kind of moments that we can't help wanting to go back to. We think about them, remember how they felt, and when more time passes we tell stories of these moments that are worth reliving.

One day things can be going along like they always were and then, suddenly, in a simple rotation of an overheated planet, everything can change.

But I do remember this thing that this famous rabbi wrote once about how Christians build cathedrals, these gorgeous impressive structures, but Jews, with a long history of watching their buildings get destroyed, build their cathedrals in time. The High Holidays. Shabbat. Cathedrals carved out of time that can never be worn down. I know you're no Jew but I kind of think that's what you did with your summer down here.

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.

Years vanish. Months collapse. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards. It seems orderly until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the whole thing skyward. Imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring like a flock of birds.

What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.

If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes?

I'm not giving you up," she said. The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body. "And you'd better not be giving me up," she said. Every syllable, deliberate. "I'm not giving you up, Shirl," I sobbed. "I was so afraid that—" "I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me," she said. "And you are my brother's daughter.

only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: "What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest

My life is a museum," says my ninety-one-year-old aunt. "I can walk through any of the galleries at any time.

morning was true will by evening have become a lie.

He's been reading James Gleick, and repeats a passage to Ben by heart. "If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.

grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time.

Somewhere, a clock ticks. Sand pours through the hourglass. I am no longer interested in the stories but rather, what is underneath the stories: the soft, pulsating thing that is true.

Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you're capable of imagining is already a thing of the past.

Every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.