Quotes About Time

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?

She looked like a woman who had spent her whole life waiting in line.

Slow" works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.

she'd come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time.

Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.

But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he'd be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn't be any worse off.

Jesus, sixty-six years old. He'd hoped that by now he wouldn't have to be so vigilant, that given enough time the madness--because that's what his spells amounted to--would ebb.

To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama's enemy.

Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully

Stone seems to bring into play an opposite quality of time. Stone, unlike man-made materials, is a primary material; therefore, it seems to existed not in a bracketed temporality but in a time that implies the infinite. Stone seems to have an otherworldly quality to it.

You are old, Father William—

Albert Einstein once said, "Sit with a beautiful woman for an hour and it seems like a minute, sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour—that's relativity.

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.

Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute objectivity of attitude. The most rigorously determined attitude of objectivity is, at best, relative. We are human; we are the slaves of our assumptions, of time and circumstance; we are the victims of our passions and illusions; and the most our critics can ask of us is this: Have you taken your passions, your illusions, your time, and your circumstance into account?

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright's own time, William Faulkner.

Contrite words cannot now stop profound processes which white men set in motion on this earth some four hundred years ago; four hundred years is a long time…time enough for habits, reactions, to be converted into culture, tradition, into a raison d'être for millions….

Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.

Energy, not time, is the main currency in high performance.

Fifteen minutes," she said, climbing out. "At least. I gotta park my truck somewhere else. And walk all the way back. And sneak all the way in. Secret rendezvous, you know…they take time.

The sole purpose of all the other work was just to buy time to be still for a moment and write.

I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for grandfather, too, that it reminded him to never forget again that the heart of it all is mystery, and that science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery—a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

Even up until the final moment of life, bat and moth are linked together forever, through time, and beyond. As a last-gasp evasive maneuver, a fleeing moth will sometimes stop its wingbeats in midflight, thereby ceasing to give off data to the bat's radar. But sometimes the bat will pause, too, so that the moth can't pick up any radar signals-the bat seeming to have disappeared-and for just the briefest of moments they will both hang there, suspended in eternity.