Quotes About Time

I did not want to live out my life in the strennous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tic-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foilbles...

To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.

Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity.

Nothing so much torments a geezer as the thought of the unlived life.

I admired the way she was staying a single step in front of her madness in the way that so many of us do by merely watching the clock where each tick brings us safely over the lip of the future, our madness a split second behind us.

Out the kitchen window, in the cool autumn breeze between where I sat and our family burial ground, I felt for an instant I could see time moving in the air. I knew I was being foolish but it struck me as odd that time never went backward except in the fragile structure of memory.

There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything.

Oh sons and daughters of man, under the vast and starry night though the stars are invisible, what are you doing here while your histories moment by moment trail off behind you like auto exhaust

We think of life as a solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid.

See as much as you can see, I guess. Rachel Carson said most of us go through life unseeing. I do that some days...I think it's easier to see when you're a kid. We're not in a hurry to get anywhere and we don't have those long to-do lists you guys have.

Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don't get let you know exactly where you're at, where you're headed and where you can never go again.

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.

Tell them you came, and saw, and looked into my eyes and saw the shadow of the guard receding. Thoughts in time and out of season, the hitchinker stood by the side of the road and levelled his thumb in the calm calculus of reason. [...] Why does my mind circle around you? Why do planets wonder what it would be like to be you? All your soft wild promises were words, birds, endlessly in flight.

No heavenly power will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

the time to hesitate is through no time to wallowin the mire Try now we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre

The time you wait subtracts the joy The heads the angel you destroy

We came from over here, to over there Then told we wonder mindless to degree most seldom furls in slumber, burns begins a century.

You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

You've got no time at all, but it seems like you've got forever. You've got nothing to do, but it seems like you've got everything. You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven't moved hardly, they've hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they've measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You've got forever, but that's no time at all.

Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more time available for change? Those two numbers—900 and 7,800—will appear over and over in this book.

The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye. The story of love is Hello and Goodbye. Until we meet again.......

Diana wept a tear after we made love and said, My Earthly darling, I must bid you farewell… She could have been my wife, But her time, I didn't dare wish to waste.

It wasn't…too long ago. But it feels like…years ago…since I felt…the warm hello of the sun. Lately things seem a little colder, the wind…it seems to get a little bolder. The eagle was flying…now it's on the run. But then again, it's all in my mind. Ever since I lost that glow I've been feeling so down all the time. Where's that girl of mine…

Life never was long enough to provide time for enemies. Nor is it long enough for people who bore me, or for me to stand around boring and antagonizing others, or for all of us, the others and me, to get into these half-friendly, half-sour fender-bumpings of egos and personalities and ideas, a process which turns a day into a contest when it really should be a series of hours serving your pleasure.