Quotes About Time

Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...

Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I've done it all my life.

The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. She measured time in pages.

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.

There is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody

The other cyclists used to take breaks to watch him do it. Lean their bikes against the incline and time him with the second hand of their wristwatches. 62.8 every time. That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.

When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines—I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?

She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.

But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now.

He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do 'something', that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?

Every New Year's Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either.

time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. N-W

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.

Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.