Quotes About Time

THAT AFTERNOON

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

All I hope is that it is not too late... I am very much afraid that it is. But we can only do our best, and give the rest of what we have - whatever there may be left to us.

As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact and seemingly everlasting. But the outworks and the battlements had fallen away, and its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a lifelong familiarity.

I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.

When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you're fifty, you'll see. I am fifty. I haven't seen anything.

Insane was letting an opportunity pass you by. Insane was debating so long over what you wanted that it disappeared.

of the murder and whether he could possibly have been out there at the country club at the time the murder was committed. "There's not a chance. At the time the murder must have been committed, Hedley was in a drugstore having

things which seem frightfully important at the time have a habit of fading into insignificance. Events are like telephone poles, streaming back past the observation platform of a speeding train. They loom large at first, then melt into the distance, becoming so tiny they finally disappear altogether…. That's the way with nearly all of the things we think are so vital.

Laugh now, cry later.

Friends are annuals that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a perennial that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.

The other night he took me to dinner. We were having a wonderful time when he remarked, You can certainly tell the wives from the sweethearts. I stopped licking the stream of butter dripping down my elbow and replied, What kind of crack is that?

I don't think women outlive men, Doctor. It only seems longer.

given another shot at life, I would seize every minute of it ... look at it and really see it ... try it on ... live it ... exhaust it ... and never give that minute back until there was nothing left of it.

I try, but somehow I am always the woman in the wrong line. Lines are like a foreign language. You have to know how to read and to translate them. What looks to me like a thirty-second transaction invariably ends up as a tenor thirty-minute wait.

The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. —LEO TOLSTOI

The eminent biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote in a masterful essay (1955) that evolution would soon have weeded man out if his cultural categories of space, time, causality, etc., were entirely deceptive.

We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

There is a time to silence an adversary with the honey of logical persuasion, and there is a time to silence him with the argument of a heavily directed club.

It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.