Quotes About Time

HOLY COW! Wrinkles only go where smiles have been.

I'm growing older but not up, my metabolic rate is pleasantly stuck. Let the hands of time blow over my head, I'd rather die while I'm living, then live while I'm dead...

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

We cannot change the history of the past.

As our mountain friend says, 'It takes about forty-five or fifty years before we realize that we can go to bed at about ten o'clock and not miss anything much.

plan as though Jesus is not returning for a hundred years and live as though Jesus is returning today.

Tudo o que já foi, é o começo do que vai vir, toda a hora a gente está num cômpito.

quando é que a velhice começa, surgindo de dentro da mocidade.

A única esperança que nos resta é que estas contradições sejam uma questão de gerações. No futuro haveremos de parecer bem ridículos.

They [best dressed women] don't want to look like their daughters. They want their own individual brand of chic. […] The cut and fit must be exactly right, and they are willing to spend hours in the fitting room to make sure of it. They spend money, too. But if any one of them went broke tomorrow she'd rather choose one perfectly cut expensive dress and make it do for years than buy a dozen cheap ones.

You have your wonderful memories, people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

Time is the school in which we learn.  

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.

This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

Time is the school in which we learn.

The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.