Quotes About Time

Sometimes...it seems as though not a moment has moved, but then you look up and you're already old or you already have a household of kids or you look down and see your feet are miles and miles away from the rest of you—and you realize you've grown up.

I want to write this down, that the revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere. And maybe for a short time, we're a part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over.

They're all inside of us,...past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.

I want to write this down, that revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere. And maybe for a short time, we're part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over. We walk slowly toward the park, where I can already see the big swings empty and waiting for me. And after I write it down, maybe I'll end it this way. My name is Jacqueline Woodson and I am ready for the ride.

I held on to my mama's Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy's stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.

You know what, Daddy? What you got for me, Melody? This place feels like from a long time ago. It feels like it's in the past tense.

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Here she was, in all of her deep unknowing knowing that this was the place, this was the time to keep me here by letting me know how easy it would have been to stay fifteen. That the people I loved almost as much as I loved my own father would have determined me optional. Two words spoken early enough, I'm pregnant

But what I know now is this: Look at your grandmother's face. Remember the lines. Touch her cheekbones. Hold the memory of her in your fingers, in your eyes, in your mind. It might be all you get to keep.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

Now I know that, when you lose a child, it's not the same as losing a contemporary, even a beloved husband or wife. When you lose a child, you grieve as a child grieves, which is to say, you grieve backward. You don't get better as time passes, you get worse. Time does not take you closer to acceptance, only further from the one you love.

Maybe we don't get a long past. Maybe we just get a future.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.

Sans fin regarder poindre une seconde nuit

Anyone who questions the value of the 'fact' draws down on himself the most severe reproaches of our day: he is a 'reactionary,' he wants to go back to the 'good old days,' and those who make these reproaches do not realize that such questioning is, perhaps, the only revolutionary attitude possible at the present time.

He judges the present time in virtue of a meta-historical fact, and the incursion of this event into the present is the only force capable of throwing off the dead weight of social and political institutions which are gradually crushing the life out of our present civilization.

We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.

The first private clocks appeared in the sixteenth century. Thenceforward, time was an abstract measure separated from the traditional rhythms of life and nature.

My blood is become water; youth is frozen into senility; all things worth while are gone.

The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending.

What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

We are not the same persons this year as last nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.