Quotes About Time

While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

Are you - are you sad? - No. But your - your songs are sad. - My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.

If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.

I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS

All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers' existence during the time the fiction was written.

Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

It's more the way it is now than it's ever been," Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower's that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.

I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

You're from the future, Mr Netherton? Not exactly, he said. I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn't tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

It's more the way it is now than it's ever been

The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely. The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one's funeral, and how could it be otherwise?

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. Surely

mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

Are you—are you sad?" —No. "But your—your songs are sad." —My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells. "I—I knew that. Once.

My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you.