Quotes About Time

When you're young you do think that things last forever. Unfortunately, they don't.

Lives had been spent here—people had loved one another and eaten and drunk and laughed and betrayed and been afraid of death—and not a single fragment of that remained. White stones, black shadows.

On Midsummer's Day, she said. At midday. As long as I live. As long as I live...

There is time, and there is what is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time.

He said, Lyra, gal, it won't be long now. When you see that old bear, you tell him Lee went out fighting. And when the battle's over, there'll be all the time in the world to drift along the wind and find the atoms that used to be Hester, and my mother in the sagelands, and my sweethearts – all my sweethearts... Lyra, child, you rest when this is done, you hear? Life is good, and death is over...

It was just as Dr. Relf had described it to him, but finer than he could ever have imagined. The thirty-six pictures around the dial were minute and clear, the three hands and the one needle were exquisitely shaped out of some silver-gray metal, and a golden sunburst surrounded the center of the dial.

Your death taps you on the shoulder, or takes your hand, and says, come along o' me, it's time. It might happen when you're sick with a fever, or when you choke on a piece of dry bread, or when you fall off a high building; in the middle of your pain and travail, your death comes to you kindly and says easy now, easy, child, you come along o' me, and you go with them in a boat out across the lake into the mist. What happens there, no one knows. No one's ever come back.

But events have consequences, and sometimes the effects of what we once did take a long time to become fully apparent.

You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.

When you're young, you do think that things last forever

To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're doing what I always warned you agin: you're a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do... Don't you worry that John Faa's heart is too soft to strike a blow when the time comes. And the time will come under judgement. Not under passion.

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth - the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean.

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harbouring for you for all these years?

The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.

To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it's just an everyday fact that one's life is at stake.

Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse... there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.

the joy of awakening each morning knowing there were all those empty hours ahead to be filled only with work.

His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one. Good. You lived, his mother replied, and his father said, Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.

Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.