Quotes About Time

The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.

La muerte es una vida vivida. La vida es una muerte que viene.

This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not.

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

A la realidad le gustan las simetrías y los leves anacronismos

zaman beni sürükleyen bir nehir, ama nehir benim; beni parçalayan bir kaplan, ama kaplan benim; beni tüketen bir ateÅŸ, ama ateÅŸ benim; evren, ne yaz?k ki gerçek; ben, ne yaz?k ki, borges'im

Esa trama de tiempos que se aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o que secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas la posibilidades. No existimos en la mayoría de esos tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros, yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que un favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismas palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma.

La casa no es tan grande, pensó. La agrandan la penumbra, la simetría, los espejos, los muchos años, mi desconocimiento, la soledad.

I can't talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it's very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.

Modificar el pasado no es modificar un solo hecho; es anular sus consecuencias, que tienden a ser infinitas

Una vez, tu finado padre nos dijo que no se puede medir el tiempo por días, como el dinero por centavos o pesos, porque los pesos son iguales y cada día es distinto y tal vez cada hora. No comprendí muy bien lo que decía, pero me quedó grabada la frase.

Cuando uno extraña un lugar, lo que realmente extraña es la época que corresponde a ese lugar; no se extrañan los sitios, sino los tiempos.

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again, There is a street close by forbidden to my feet, There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time, There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world. Among the books in my library (I have them before me) There are some that I shall never open now. This summer I complete my fiftieth year; Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.

Pensé en un mundo sin memoria, sin tiempo; consideré la posibilidad de un lenguaje que ignorara los sustantivos, un lenguaje de verbos impersonales y de indeclinables epítetos. Así fueron muriendo los días y con los días los años, pero algo parecido a la felicidad ocurrió una mañana. Llovió, con lentitud poderosa.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.

Después reflexioné que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y sólo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aire, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mí...

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.