Quotes About Time

Difficult years lie ahead, patience is required.

The wagon rests in winter, the sleigh in summer, the horse never.

You might not trust me. Please give me a chance and time. I will prove myself for all of you.

Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one's self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Don't boast because you know too little," Mrs. Pang says. "Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he'll become tomorrow.

I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.

It saddened her that Luo insisted on holding on to her as if they had started to share some vital organs during their twenty years of marriage. She wondered if this was a sign of old age, of losing hope and the courage for changes. She herself could easily picture vanishing from their shared life, but then perhaps it was a sign of aging on her part, a desire for loneliness that would eventually make death a relief.

To kill time - an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.

Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one's neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one's hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return.

I wished that life could be reset, but reset from when?

Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally, and reliable annihilator?

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life's necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character - depending on the charity of memory.

There's a reason for every relationship, that's what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one's on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don't end up randomly as father and daughter, that's for sure.

contemporaries,

Does marriage have such a revolutionary power that a long-established habit can be overthrown in such a short time?

perhaps we could take the liberty to believe, for all we know, that this era may last for the next hundred years?—is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever.

Rather, I want one day to be able to say to myself: Dear friend, we have waited this out.

There is no point in waiting, as every moment is the right moment.

Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.