Quotes About Time

Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life.

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite?

But for anything to be alive, it required motion : the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba's elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time.

It's foolhardy to think that a story ends

What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday. She

But was a miracle still a miracle if it came too late?

What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably changing yesterday.

He remembered Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear All this I cannot do.

For all her talent, and for all of Kai's, it was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift. His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear

Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations?

Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday.

It is hardly surprising that I have devoted a great deal of time and energy in my professional career to encouraging parents to be present with the child right in front of them rather than being overly focused on the future.

In this respect, I think I was an effective parent—one who understood that family time was precious, and unrecoverable—and so in my own family a lot of time was spent in family rituals and encouraging each other's particular skills and interests.

This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.

There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.

What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.

I lay back and tried not to think of the minutes passing. Just yesterday we had a wealth of them. Now each was a drop of heartsblood lost.

Surely there was some divine trick to make the hours go faster. To let them slip past unseen, to sleep for years, so that when I woke again the world would be new. I closed my eyes. Through the window I heard the bees singing in the garden. My lion's tail beat against the stones. An eternity later, when I opened my eyes, the shadows had not even moved.

All those years I had spent with them were like a stone tossed in a pool. Already, the ripples were gone.

I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself.

Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.

He smiled at me, and I saw the lines where other smiles had been.