Quotes About Time

Most of us, however, live fractured lives. We might be here, but our minds are over there; our bodies are in the present, but our minds are in the past or the future. We need to give our undivided attention to the present because this is when life is happening—right here and right now. Here and now is the only place and time we can meet each other and meet God.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

My patience, like my time in this world, grows shorter.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain.

Neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor surrendering, until the sun finished its daily pilgrimage, for no day is so long that it is not ended by nightfall.

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

Fate's schedule is not always naked and clear.

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it serves no purpose. It's a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

You've been gone for decades, you hid deep in my lakes, why now, why infect my dreams now? What flood is this?

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

Perfect name, the waiting room, waiting, waiting we were waiting, wait with me, Doc, wait and hope was the motto of Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, and did you know that the Spanish word for waiting and hoping is the same, so why couldn't we call this the hoping room, or would that be too depressing, why introduce our desires into the mix, who wants to be reminded of his longing?

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

She also taught me how to pray, another discipline I didn't keep up with. In the beginning I was too busy, what with housework, cooking, and educating myself. I had little time for a god who had little time for me. As I matured, I had no use for one. Emmanuel Lévinas suggested that God left in 1941. Mine left in 1975. And in 1978, and in 1982, and in 1990.

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

I don't hesitate when buying green bananas, but I'm slowing down.

If I tell the truth—and I should, shouldn't I?—I translate books with my invented system because it makes time flow more gently. That's the primary reason, I think. As Camus said in The Fall: "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

The ticktock of the tiny object full of gears suffocating all existence, wringing life out of life.

Her appearance has changed as well, and I don't mean just the intense reticulation of lines and wrinkles, the true stigmata of life.

Mark Twain's quote: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I imagine looking at the room through a stranger's eyes. Books everywhere, stacks and stacks, shelves and bookcases, stacks atop each shelf, I in the creaky chair that hasn't been reupholstered since I bought it in the early sixties. I have been its only occupant; years ago its foam molded into the shape of my posterior. The accompanying ottoman holds two stacks of books that haven't been disturbed in years, except for semiweekly dusting.

When I think of ages past That have floated down the stream Of life and love and death, I feel how free it makes us To pass away.

At my dying hour, and over my long life,A clock strikes somewhere at the city's edge.