logo

Quotes About Time

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.
~ John Steinbeck
Life passes by in a wink so try to never miss a moment of it.
~ John Steinbeck
You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.
~ John Steinbeck
But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
~ John Steinbeck
Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.
~ John Steinbeck
We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.
~ John Steinbeck
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment.
~ John Steinbeck
Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.
~ John Steinbeck
He always tell what it will be like someday. Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does.
~ John Steinbeck
S-l-o-w-ness--it gave meaning to everything. It made everything royal.
~ John Steinbeck
A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
~ John Steinbeck
Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.
~ John Steinbeck
The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space has ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, traveling to Honolulu.
~ John Steinbeck
Time is the only critic without ambition.
~ John Steinbeck
For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events t give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.
~ John Steinbeck
It's like a life--so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.
~ John Steinbeck
He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it. Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life.
~ John Steinbeck
Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.
~ John Steinbeck
A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many.
~ John Steinbeck
It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.
~ John Steinbeck
Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.
~ John Steinbeck
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased
~ John Steinbeck
We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.
~ John Steinbeck
Morning seems to come earlier every year I live.
~ John Steinbeck