Quotes About Time

You can't repeat the past.

The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time-time, that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights.

In fact to write (This Side of Paradise) took three months; to conceive it-- three minutes; to collect the data in it-- all my life.

We drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

One o' clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o'clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never come back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusions, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single people to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

Gatsby credeva nella luce verde, nel futuro orgastico che anno dopo anno si ritira davanti a noi. Ieri c'è sfuggito, ma non importa: domani correremo più forte, allungheremo di più le braccia ... e un bel mattino... Così continuiamo a remare, barche contro corrente, risospinti senza posa nel passato.

For this is wisdom—to love and live,     To take what fate or the gods may give,     To ask no question, to make no prayer,     To kiss the lips and caress the hair,     Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow,     To have and to hold, and, in time—let go.

for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - Nick Carraway

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows—the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?' 'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

There was one of his loneliness coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully – assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

to have and to hold, and, in time - let go

Piensa en cuánto me quieres - había susurrado-. No te voy a pedir que me quieras siempre como ahora, pero sí te pido que lo recuerdes. Pase lo que pase, siempre quedará en mí algo de lo que soy esta noche

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.' 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

Y así vamos adelante, botes que reman contra la corriente, incesantemente arrastrados hacia el pasado.

Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.

She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and inescapable significance—making her wonder, through these nebulous half-fevered hours whether after all she had not wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality. Years

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

As he sat on the side of the bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.