Quotes About Time

Our time's the most precious thing we've got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us.

The years that had passed had displayed vividly before our eyes the fickleness of human attitudes.

I am a slow worker, but I could have written at least two books more in the time that I have been obliged to spend waiting around public offices and in the back yards of recruiting stations—waiting unnecessarily for unnecessary things.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

Time itself made all things rare.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

Time itself makes all things rare.

That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.

Time hangs off me like molting skin.

For the living, death is thievery.

Just because there are lots of them doesn't mean that the hot apple pies aren't excellent or that it isn't a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare.

His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he'll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it isn't evil. Just like all that exercise of yours has nothing to do with being good. I know you think it does. It makes you feel good, and feel good about yourself, and feel superior to people who slob around all day. But it's mostly a waste of time that doesn't do anything for anybody else but you.

I can't imagine that I'm supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.

How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story.

I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch.

You were nice to me for almost ten years," he said gruffly. "Why should that count for nothing just because it's not going to be eleven?

She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append "only" to such a sobering milestone.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.

Academic time moves quickly. A college year is not really a year, lacking as it does three months. And it is endlessly divided into units which, at their beginning, appear larger than they are — terms, half terms, months, weeks. And the ultimate unit, the hour, is not really an hour, lacking as it does ten minutes.

It is in time of peace that the value of life is fixed. The test of war reveals it.

The wiser a man is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of the evolving present. He doesn't break the flow of life, he directs it, hastens it, but preserves its continuity.

Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.