Quotes About Time

There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.

Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.

In the end I was the clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

It took me as long as I had known him to get rid of all of his words. Like turning an hourglass over.

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.

It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time.

What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

I think after you live it's like before you lived.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all.

Ich versuche mich an alles zu erinnern, was ich getan habe, Oskar. Und alles, was ich nicht getan habe. Die Fehler, die ich begangen habe, sind mir egal. Aber was ich nie getan habe, kann ich auch nicht zurücknehmen.

He was caught somewhere between his mother's last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be

Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.

The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame.