Quotes About Time

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

My usual confessional is a straight Macallan but not before 5 o'clock. Perhaps that's why I try and have my crises in the evening.

You can change everything about yourself - your name, your home, your skin color, your gender, even your parents, your private history - but you can't change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through.

It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

You are young, said my father. You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day. You'll get older, said my mother, that's what happens. Then what happens? You won't be able to find the treasure. Will I be too old to look for it? No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place.

And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman!s fortune or one man!s loss. And we can!t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. Unfortunately, the record is far from complete.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.

Once you start recognizing your own obsessions, you know you're getting old.

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.

There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have been confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.

Time is a boomerang, not an arrow.

Anyone could see the ticker tape. It was more frightening than the that never stopped calculating the national debt. This one said '27 SHOPPING DAYS TO CHRISTMAS'. It might as well have said '27 DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON'.

I'm not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I'm telling you because I know.

En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.

All time is eternally present and so all time is ours, There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming.

If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.

Getting older happens suddenly. It's like swimming out to sea and realising that the shore you're making for isn't the shore where you started out.

They live in the opposite of the past. I said, You mean the future? No, Ry. The opposite of the past is the present. Anyone can live in a past that is gone or a future that does not exist. The opposite of either position is the present.

And you and me in the car where we've always been, where we'll always be, this night, this road, even when we're gone and the road is gone and the city is gone but we'll be here because everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.