Quotes About Time

Nihil sub sole novum [...] Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.

Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. Are you happy here? I said at last. He considered this for a moment. Not particularly, he said. But you're not very happy where you are, either.

I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found…

Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time:

honestly can't remember much else about those years

Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn't take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days.

or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Three years is a long time." "It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean," said Andy reasonably, "look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet.

maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took a while to sink in. You didn't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.

But if you close the door… the night could last forever…

Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was n longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.

Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took awhile for it to sink in. You don't feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Nihil sub sole novum

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do.

Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow?

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it.

It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life