Quotes About Time

In this brief Sabbath now, time fit To be eternal. Such a bliss Of bloom's no ornament, but root And light, a saving loveliness, Starred firmament here underfoot.

The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill's fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account, A place enclosed in song.

But won't you be ashamed To count the passing year At its mere cost, your debt Inevitably paid? For every year is costly, As you know well. Nothing Is given that is not Taken, and nothing taken That was not first a gift.

He been a good man always, I think, but this tenderness was new. It was the tenderness of an old man who had been busy all his life but now had time to pay attention to useless things. But it was more than that . . . a suffering he neither complained of nor denied.

Bewildered in our timely dwelling place, Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.

And I have dreamed of the morning coming in like a bird through the window not burdened by a thought, —Wendell Berry, from "The Design of The House: Ideal and Hard Time," New Collected Poems (Counterpoint Press, 2012)

Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience. Loss Has rectified the songs that come Into this columned room, and he Only in silence, nothing in hand Comes here. A generosity Is here by which the fallen stand.

We must take love to the limit of time, because time can not limit it. A life cannot limit it. Maybe to have it in your heart all your life in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.

The future was coming to me, but I had not so much as lifted a foot to go to it.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present

help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past.

PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It's not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else's world. To find myself in someone else's words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

But some words to men and women, boys and girls alike: The quality of the work must merit the readers' time and money. Do it for yourself, but make yourself a member of your own audience. There is no other way to evaluate your own progress.

A word of faith that never balks Here, or henceforward it is all the same to me I accept Time absolutely It alone is without flaw It alone rounds and completes all That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all I accept Reality and dare not question it

Even at a young age one sometimes recognizes that there are behavior patterns that would simply be a waste of time for everyone concerned, which leads you to put them out of your mind or avoid them until you reach a certain stage of inebriation, whereupon everything is reconsidered again.

proof. It will come in its own time and in its own way. What I can do is describe how I have learned to use it

The Sleep lasted six hours. For most of that time John lay beside Miriam watching the shadows.

The tiny lines extending from the corners of his eyes were no illusion. He touched his cheek and felt a delicate dryness, a subtle stiffening. Weren't there also circles under his eyes, and even more lines around his mouth?

Eumenes had been with her more than 400 years, Lollia nearly as long. Until now not one of her transformations had failed to last 200 years. Was she getting worse at it, or was the strength of the human stock in decline?

the shimmering movement of God's hand across time, drawing life toward the knowledge of him. I

We who have grandly fill'd our time; With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past. - SONG OF THE REDWOOD-TREE