Quotes About Time

Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.

We are old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.

Rome, if built at all, must be built in a day.

Surely the lives of the old are briefer than the young.

In it, he pushed the metric of typewriter spaces, and quoted from a poem, "The Catholic Bells," to show us Williams's "mature style at fifty"! This was a memorable phrase, and one that made maturity seem possible, but a long way off. I more or less memorized "The Catholic Bells," and spent months trying to console myself by detecting immaturities in whatever Williams had written before he was fifty.

Then the dry road dust rises to whiten the fatigued elm leaves- the nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone. They're all gone into a world of light; the farm's my own.

They fly by like a train window:

Things last, but sometimes for days here only children seem fit to handle children, and there is no utility or inspiration in the wind smashing without direction. The fresh paint on the captains' houses hides softer wood.

Who can help us from our nothing to the all, we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check?

If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heel of small war--until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime

We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

From the next hour he will be reading from ancient text." "How ancient, I asked, a thousend years or last weeks?" "Very ancient, the girl said solemmly, but it is a forgivable interuption under those cicumstances, and the texts will just become more ancient in waiting.

History does not unfold: it piles up.

Hands of time move us forward, never back. Only memories frozen in mind, can we reenact.

One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image—thinking of all past people lined up in orderly columns behind those living—'row upon row rise the phantoms behind us'. Actually, looking over our shoulder, we would see only around 15 rows.

We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone.

He always wrote on the flyleaf of each new book the date and where he was, so I can follow him: reading Chesterton just after they were married in November 1929, Scottish poets the following spring.

But it was on the occasions that he did the unexpected that he felt the most alive. Time seemed to stop; hours slowed to minutes, separated into seconds, halted into pictures. Still life images of emotion.

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

that every man knows and marks his birthday each year, but can take no notice of his deathday, though it comes round with the same regularity.