Quotes About Time

Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I'd try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I'd figure out how old I'd be when the century ended, years, months, days and now look, incredible we're here - we're six years in and I realize I'm the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won't step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it.

We travel into or away from our photographs.

He knew time and day of week and wondered when such scraps of data would begin to feel disposable.

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.

And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny.

There's just so much time set aside for baffled reaction. I believe we've reached the limit.

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.

Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.

I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition.

A sunset is the story of the world's day.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [...] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness. (WN 291-2)

Maybe that was the answer I needed, the one route back. So simple. To decide to love the age.

There's a dolphin's brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.

It takes centuries to invent the primitive.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.

The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.

This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.

Let's enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said.