Quotes About Time

Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

There's a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked. Aliens land on Earth. They operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans. He can't remember how the story ends. It doesn't matter. Every branch's tip has its own new bud.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

And yet, places remember what people forget.

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.

There's a Chinese saying. 'When is the best time to plan a tree? Twenty years ago.

The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being . . . the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.

Such a small difference, between forever and once.

How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.

Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

You can watch the hour hand, Mimi finds, hold your eyes on it all around the circle of the clock, and never once see it move.

Long answers need long time. And long time is exactly what's vanishing.

It's a rare week when we dead-to-be don't surrender a few more minutes of our souls to the overflowing archives.

The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

And there's only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.

Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted.

Yet, soon enough, an afternoon, half an hour, a minute, half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size. They disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all.

When is the next best time? Now.' " "Ah! Okay!" The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.