Quotes About Time

It was the English word she used. It was in English that the past was unilateral; in Bengali, the word for yesterday, kal, was also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb, to distinguish what had already happened from what would be.

Solitude demands a precise assessment of time, I've always understood this. It's like the money in your wallet: you have to know how much time you need to kill, how much to spend before dinner, what's left over before going to bed.

In those six weeks I regarded her arrival as I would the arrival of a coming month, or season - something inevitable, but meaningless at the same time.

Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.

You will have a wife, and children of your own, and they will want to be driven to different places at the same time. No matter how kind they are, one day they will complain about visiting your mother, and you will get tired of it too...You will miss one day, and another, and then she will have to drag herself onto a bus just to get herself a bag of lozenges.

He regretted only one thing: that he had not met her sooner, that he had not known her every day of his life.

I'm flummoxed by this unraveling of time, I'm losing my grip on myself. I know that nothing awful will happen on the other side of the door. If anything, I'm about to have a perfectly forgettable day: a class to teach, a meeting with colleagues, maybe a movie. But I'm afraid of forgetting something crucial—my cell phone or my identity card, my health insurance or my keys. And I'm afraid of running into trouble.

He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality.

The years the couple have together are a shared conclusion to lives separately built, separately lived. There is no use wondering what might have happened if the man had met her in his forties, or in his twenties. He would not have married her then.

In Hindu philosophy the three tenses—past, present, future—were said to exist simultaneously in God. God was timeless, but time was personified as the god of death. Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance.

At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.

She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday.

We write books in a fixed moment in time, in a specific phase of our consciousness and development. That is why reading words written years ago feels alienating. You are no longer the person whose existence depended on the production of those words.

She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight.

She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.

She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating.

But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.

Again, as it was after Udayan's death, there was an acute awareness of time, of the future looming, accelerating. The baby's lifetime, so scant, already outdistancing and outpacing her own. This was the logic of parenthood.

She wanted to shut her eyes to it. She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating. She was made to anticipate it against her will.

Es el típico día que parece terminar minutos después de haber comenzando y que echa por tierra los planes que tenía Ashima de hacer muchas cosas, porque la inminencia de la noche la distrae.

I see the people who have lived here forever. They walk quickly, indifferent to the buildings. They cross the squares without stopping. I

There had been nothing worse than waiting for it to come; the void that followed was easier to bear than the solid weight of those days.

Havia a ansiedade de que uum dia não se sucedesse ao outro, junto com a certeza de que certamente se sucederia. Era como prender a respiração, como Udayan tentara fazer na baixada. E, no entanto, de alguma maneira ela estava respirando. Assim como o tempo ficava parado, mas também passava, alguma outra parte de seu corpo que lhe era inconsciente estava agora extraindo oxigêncio, obrigando-os a continuar.