Quotes About Time

He hated clocks that ticked; every click a moment gone. Couldn't imagine sleeping in a room with one, drifting into unconsciousness to the sound of life slipping away.

of smiling strangers hanging on each other, holding up beer bottles, all of them seeming to be having a great time. He wondered how old the photos were

And if I really can see the future, then what does it mean? Is there any sense in our lives if everything is already out there, just waiting to happen? For if that were so, then life would be a horrible monster indeed, with no chance of escape from fate, from destiny. It would be like reading a book, but reading it backwards, from the final chapter down to chapter one, so that the end is already known to you.

Temporal grace,' said the Doctor. 'No weapons can function inside the TARDIS – even something as simple as a spear.

The longest part of the journey is said to be the passing of the gate.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Give me a young man in whom there is something of the old, and an old man with something of the young: guided so, a man may grow old in body, but never in mind.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Pour qui est né après la seconde guerre mondiale, ces événements vieux d'un demi-siècle sont comme des histoires de loups-garous. Cependant le message par lequel s'achève le compte-rendu de ces événements, et qui ne devait être que symbolique, est devenu d'actualité. (postface, 1993)

Time was a river, not a log to be sawed into lengths.

Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.

The past is a closed door.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

The trouble with education is,' said Jimmy cheerfully, 'that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to reread it later. There's more sense in books, Cicily, than you'd really believe. Though, of course, they don't teach you anything vital that you can't learn for yourself.

Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

Whose memories are these? Who speaks to her of this gentle time that she is too young to have known herself? There was hardship then, certainly, but not hearts chained and heavy with fear. Who is it that laughs with aged lightheartedness and suggests that this is still a place of promise?

Past the village flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made.