Quotes About Time

I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).

I hope I number patience among my virtues, but shilly-shallying, when nothing is to be gained by delay, is not a virtue.

If she hasn't learned to appreciate my sterling character and spectacular good looks by this time, it's not likely she will.

Speculation,' I retorted, 'is never a waste of time. It clears away the deadwood in the thickets of deduction.

which he needs time and privacy. What better way of keeping us in Cairo

marred by deep lines of

It never registered to them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother's operation. It would have been exactly the same to them if I had read through all twenty-six volumes of Elsie Dinsmore. (The White Azalea)

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.

And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.

It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn't mind missing a meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of one's time.

the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.

Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one's life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid.

How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and spending.

Rose's own experience was that goodness, the state of being good, was only reached with difficulty and pain. It took a long time to get to it; in fact one never did get to it, or, if for a flashing instant one did, it was only for a flashing instant. Desperate perseverance was needed to struggle along its path, and all the way was dotted with doubts.

Mrs. Mitcham had seen more love about in the flat than she could remember during the whole of poor Mr. Cumfrit's time in it. She couldn't help wondering what that poor gentleman would say if he could see what was happening in his flat. He wouldn't much like it, she was afraid; but perhaps hardly anybody who was dead would much like what they would see, supposing they were able to come back and look.

Up to now I have had fourteen, but they weren't spread over my life equally, and for years and years at a time I had none. This, when first I began considering my dogs, astonished me; I mean, that for years and years I had none. What was I about, I wondered, to allow myself to be dogless? How was it that there were such long periods during which I wasn't making some good dog happy? Lately

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant . But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.

Very early in my life it was already too late.

Why do anything-- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.