Quotes About Time

I am afraid that is, as they say, impossible. Time moves forwards. We have the luxury of time but we still can't reverse it. We can't stop it. We are one-way traffic, just the same as all these mayflies.

I want to make a forest of a moment and live in that forest for ever

How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music.  How to feel time: write. How to release time: breathe.

Nothing lasts for ever. This pain won't last. The pain tells you it will last. Pain lies. Ignore it. Pain is a debt paid off with time.

This isn't a magic lamp and I am no genie. There is no set number. It could be one. It could be a hundred. But you only have an infinite number of lives to choose from so long as the time in the Midnight Library stays, well, at midnight. Because while it stays at midnight, your life – your root life – is somewhere between life and death. If time moves here, that means something very . . .' She searched for a delicate word.

Every second of every day we are entering into a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

There is only the present.

She smiles at me. She clicks the top of her pen. Then clicks it again. Each one is a moment. The first click, the pause between the click, and the second click. The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.

how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.

They die, and so they have impatience.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes. (There is a tree in California, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that was found, after an intensive ring count, to be five thousand and sixty-five years old.)

It's true. You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versailles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don't get away with anything.

madness is sometimes a question of time, and sometimes of postcode. Basically, the key rule is, if you want to appear sane on Earth you have to be in the right place, wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, and only stepping on the right kind of grass.

Places are places and memories are memories.

and advised I take things 'one day at a time', as if there were another way for days to be experienced.

The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it, the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.

My mind is racing to understand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can't quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn't know how to close itself.

know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.

All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely

There comes a moment in every life when we realise there is no land beyond the ice. There is just more ice. And then the world we know continues again. You sometimes have to look at what you know is there and discover the things right in front of you. The people you love. The time ahead of you is like the land beyond the ice. You can guess what it could be like but you can never know. All you know is the moment you are in.

History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything.

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time

One of the brighter humans, a German-born theoretical physicist called Albert Einstein, explained relativity to dimmer members of his species by telling them, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.