Quotes About Time

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What grace might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.

I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' — and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.

It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.

Lo que la Fotografía reproduce al infinito únicamente ha tenido lugar una sola vez: la Fotografía reproduce mecánicamente lo que nunca más podrá repetirse existencialmente.

Ciò che reclamo è vivere la piena contraddizione del mio tempo, che mai così bene ha reso al sarcasmo la condizione della verità.

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense is: a pure portion of anxiety.

Du passé, c'est mon enfance qui me fascine le plus ; elle seule, à la regarder, ne me donne pas le regret du temps aboli. Car ce n'est pas l'irréversible que je découvre en elle, c'est l'irréductible : tout ce qui reste encore en moi, par accès.

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

Historiquement, le discours de l'absence est tenu par la Femme : la Femme est sédentaire, l'Homme est chasseur, voyageur; la Femme est fidèle (elle attend), l'homme est coureur (il navigue, il drague). C'est la Femme qui donne forme à l'absence, en élabore la fiction, car elle en a le temps ; (…)

In the code of the Japanese haiku, there must always be a word which refers back to the time of day and to the year; this is the *kigo* the season word. Amorous notation notation retains the *kigo*that faint allusion to the rain, to the evening, to the light, to everything that envelops, diffuses.

All his life he had waited for 'the great idea that … would hit me like a bolt of lightning'. Youth was when 'the bolts of lightning come, if they are ever to strike … But now … I am hardly really young any longer … and the future is unlikely to bring any.

when 'one leads a nomadic life, as I do at the moment, it is not easy to do everything at the right time'.

Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?

Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.

Sadly, the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" ("someday I'll do this, someday I'll do that") is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro

The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

Washington dwelt upon the transcendent importance of education underscores the stigma that he felt about having missed college. As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that "every hour misspent is lost forever" and that "future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life.

Since Hamilton's abiding literary sin was prolixity, the time and length constraints imposed by The Federalist may have given a salutary concision to his writing.