Quotes About Time

But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. 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.

Earth's atmosphere at different times in history." You can't predict the past, Dad. "You can if you don't know it yet.

The third tree is all around you: Now. And like Now itself, it will follow wherever you go.

The morning overstays its welcome long before noon.

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY dances by in a five-second flip. Nicholas Hoel thumbs through the stack of a thousand photos, watching for those decades' secret meaning. At twenty-five, he's back for a moment on the farm where he has spent every Christmas of his life. He's lucky to be there, given the cancellations. Snowstorms sweep in from the west, grounding planes all over the country

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

stories free of ideas and steeped in local selves. Her salvation is close, hot, and private. It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

It depends on a person's ability to say nevertheless, to do one small thing that seems beyond them, and, for a moment, break the grip of time.

Nothing will be the same. The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same. We're all doomed, the man thinks. We have always all been doomed. But things are different this time. Yes. You're here.

Rage, the radical tip of a grief that time will never root out.

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.

When the wind stops, the stillness suspends them between two eternities, entirely in the caress of here and now.

They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

it's easy for even Nick to believe that green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour.

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning.

The accumulated possessions of generations disperse like wind-borne pollen.

Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There's work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

Nothing anyone can do for anyone, except to recall: We are every second being born.

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.

Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago." "Yep. And you always said the next best time was now." "Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.

TWENTY SPRINGS is no time at all. The hottest year ever measured comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more, almost every one of them among the hottest in recorded history. The seas rise. The year's clock breaks. Twenty springs

I'd been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

IT'S INDIANA, 1990. Here, five years is a generation, fifty is archaeology, and anything older shades off into legend. And yet, places remember what people forget.