Quotes About Time

The merry-go-round was slowing down.

Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

I mean people die every day, and the world is still spinning." Mom takes my paper and turns it around to study it. "That's a good thing." "Are you talking about life, death, or my bird?" "Life is good. Death is a mystery. The bird needs work.

It had been many months since I'd shed tears for Tomaso, but grief is like that. It's not a continuous process; it comes in waves. You can keep it at bay for a time, like a dam holding back a lake, but them something triggers an explosion inside of you, shattering the wall and letting loose a flood.

No one calls at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning unless it is to give news that cannot wait. And news that cannot wait is always bad news.

First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over. That is how it begins. The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.

Not to me," I said. Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby- Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

But I know nothing of time. I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep. It is not my fault. And I am doing so well today. I am doing so much better than I have ever done before.

But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.

Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said.

We are not where we are, he finds, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out

The best thing about being fifteen is that you don't have to be fifteen for more than a year.

So weak, so little left, time running out. I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can't help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth.

He has been marked by the past, and once that happens, nothing can be done about it. Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

At fifty-seven, I felt old. Now, at seventy-four, I feel much younger than I did then.

Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone.