Quotes About Time

But wanting don't make a thing true. You don't have to live forever to figure that out.

I have known time and distance, but not why I am here.

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name…which belongs to that non-existent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.

Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.

I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

I'm not denying there's got to be a notion of right to get business done, but by God, any particular notion at any particular time will sooner or later get to be just like a stopper put tight in a bottle of water and thrown in a hot stove the way we kids used to do at school to hear the bang. The

for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.

The grandfather's clock in the corner of the room, I suddenly realized, wasn't getting any younger. It would drop out a tick, and the tick would land inside my head like a rock dropped in a well, and the ripples would circle out and stop, and the tick would sink down the dark. For a piece of time which was not long or short, and might not even be time, there wouldn't be anything. Then the tock would drop down the well, and the ripples would circle out and finish.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

The past cannot remember the past. The future cannot generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.

The past exists in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore unreal. Any intellectualy conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization process takes place. There is no other reality." ~ from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Things that are impossible usually take time.

I'm getting older everyday, you know. I'm not like a fine wine that just gets better with age. I'm more like a good strong cheese. I can only be aged so long before I start to stink.

Love and war," he said, "are Earth's two staple commodities. We've been turning them both out in bumper crops since the beginning of time.

Know this, and know it well: time is never wasted. Wherever we go, whatever we do, everything is an aspect of education. Even when we don't immediately grasp the lesson.

To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can't be done subtly or delicately.

That is no country for old men, he thought.

Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.

We are fighting that force in the universe that nudges everything toward chaos. I mean that we are at war with time; we are enemies of entropy; we seek to snatch back those things that have been taken from us by the years—the childhood toys, the friends and relatives who are gone, the events of the past—everything, we struggle to recapture everything, back to the beginning of creation, out of this need not to let anything slip away.

We make only a small blaze, and then we go out; but in his springtime and his summer he had burned brightly enough, and he did not feel he had earned this sullen, joyless autumn.