Quotes About Time

People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

Quédate quieto. Espera. Algo en el solitario superviviente sabe que se puede resistir más allá de la irrefutable ley del Ahora.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. 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.

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.

Civilization will fade away, but that will go on forever.

Douglas Pavlick 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.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

He's never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.

He waits too long, and time replies for him.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

The past always comes clearer, in the future.

The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

As for the trees themselves, water that flows into a giant redwood through its roots takes two weeks or longer to reach the top of the tree, moving slowly upward through the tree's sapwood.

Trinity would be the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.

We call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from Norman French covre le feu: "cover the fire!

a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.

But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.