Quotes About Time

The world is not ideas, rich kid, the world is things. If you have things, you have time to dream, if you don't... You'll fight.

Zaman?n h?zland?r?lm?? ak??? kar??s?nda kendimi yavaÅŸlatmay? amaçl?yordum boÅŸu boÅŸuna.

I'll drink some wine, and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I'll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to our family's old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.

What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don't know the answer to such questions anymore.

A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age.

History is the consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness.

It's as if we're standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don't know who's in charge of the zapper.

He returned to Cambridge feeling, at the ripe old age of twenty, that life was passing him by.

This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.

And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.

Unnerved by Miss Salma R's temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time.

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.

REALITY IS A QUESTION of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times

But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.

Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scientific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed systems, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes.

Once, I belonged to the future. The beloved future of my beloved mother, that was what counted; the present was a means, and the past no more than a dull shard of pottery, a bottle dug up by my father on the beach. Now, however, I belong to yesterday. Is that a line from a song? I forget. Is it?

But the past is not less valuable because it is no longer the present. In fact, it's more important, because forever unseen.

I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.

Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, "the cradle rocks above an abyss," and the one we were all "heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man's ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life – or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny.

Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.