Quotes About Time

A living culture of work lived close to the ground, carried forward into time in the ordinary work and speech of every day, is as far as possible unlike any record that may be made of it. It may be documented as 'oral history', its stories may be remembered and written into books, it may be pictured in old photographs, but no true likeness of it can ever be reenacted or reproduced. When such a culture dies, it is not only dead, it is gone .

There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity.

The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

I have got to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here.

We stood and looked and knowed it was all the time we had and from now on we must remember. We must look now forever.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

Or rather that crisp command fell upon the current of his thought like a dry leaf on the surface of a deeply flowing stream, to be borne forty years away.

You'd have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure. "What can't be helped must be endured," Mat Feltner said. And he was a man who knew.

The difference between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, as I had to see and feel even in my own grief, was that they were old and I was young. I was filled with life, with my life and Virgil's life, with the life of our baby, and with other lives that might, in time, come to me. But the Feltners had begun to be old. Life had quit coming to them, and was going away.

said, "It's like time falling, and we and the trees are standing up in it." "No," she said. "Look. It's like we and the woods and the world are flying upward through the snow. See?

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man's legs.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time." "And how long is that going to take?" "I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery," he said "It may take longer.

I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember

I would be back in my garden all the time, working or just looking….I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

The fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature's world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans.

One morning toward the beginning of that time, while he still remained in charge of his life, though we could see that his departure had begun

Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things.

Therefore, be patient. Such pleasure as there is, is here, now. Take pleasure as it comes. Take work as it comes. The end may never come, or when it does it may be the wrong end.

The man of whom I once was pleased to say, "He is my grandfather," has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time.