Quotes About Time

All my life I have been trying to improve my German. At last my German is better —but now I am old and ill and don't have long to live. Soon I will be dead, with better German.

I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption—vain because it is endless—and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.

No one is calling me. I can't check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I'm out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.

Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?

How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

Today I am feeling that chronological order is not a good thing, even if it is easier, and that I should break it up. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?

105 years old: she wouldn't be alive today even if she hadn't died.

It is not what you want to be doing. It is that you are passing the time. You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep.

It should be so simple. You do what you can while he is awake, and then once he is asleep, you do what you can only when he is asleep, beginning with the most important thing. But it is not so simple.

That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you've been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we've explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we're having now that a few months have gone by--- but now it's time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

Our lives are in chronological order, if no other kind of order.

Eleven years—that is long. Long enough so that the roots of love, if the tree is robust, plunge so deep that they will subsist always, even dried up.

The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal--we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.

Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion - you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over.

Because we have so much eye candy and mind candy, spending so much time trying to pay the rent, all of this conspires to keep us from thinking too hard or taking action from that. Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen.

The evidence of death is before my eyes constantly. Moving from me outward. My death always a step in advance. The world is a mirror of myself dying. The world not dying anymore than I die. I more alive a hundred years from now. Than at this very moment.

I never thought anything I did was shocking. If you can't take it for 20 minutes, you try living' it for 20 or 40 years.

Time are vulgar, I told myself in the prudish and bombastic tone of those who believe themselves to be exempt from the criticisms they throw at others.

As personagens são como vampiros, cravam os caninos na nossa jugular e quando amanhece, voltam aos seus sepulcros até que anoiteça de novo. O fim do livro seria a pedra que ponho sobre esses visitantes. Definitivamente? Não. Um dia, de repente, com outro nome e outras feições e em outro tempo volta mascarada a mesma personagem, elas gostam da vida. Como nós.

Lembro da ampulheta quebrada, entrei no escritório do pai para pegar o lápis vermelho e esbarrei no vidro do tempo. Fiquei em pânico vendo o tempo estacionado no chão: dois punhados de areia e os cacos. Passado e futuro. E eu? Onde ficava eu agora que o era e o será se despedaçaram? Só o funil da ampulheta resistira e no funil, o grão de areia em trânsito sem se comprometer com os extremos. Livre.

Tinha um relógio grande assim na torre e eu queria me agarrar nos ponteiros, segurar as horas, por que é que o tempo não parava um pouco? Queria ficar lá dependurado, segurando o tempo.

E se a vida estiver lá fora, naquelas vozes que desdenhei? E se o desvio da minha rota foi exatamente esse que escolhi? Mas haverá ainda tempo?

Chego mais perto de minha dona, continua bela apesar dos estragos, seduziu o tempo. Como seduziu as pessoas.