Quotes About Time

The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts.

I am quite gifted at waiting.

It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.

Para aquellos hombres el tiempo era un exceso, un barril que se vaciaba lentamente. Cuando en realidad, piensa él, se parece más a un charco luminoso que uno lleva entre las manos y debe proteger con toda su energía, luchar para no derramar ni una sola gota".

This is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

It's a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?

For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.

Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.

The heart heals but never completely.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary

You'll die of old age, we'll die of climate change.

A veces me descubro mirándolo y me olvido completamente de mis obligaciones. Es lo bastante grande como para contener en su interior todas las cosas que un hombre puede sentir a lo largo de toda una vida.

But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

Se pelo menos a vida fosse como um romance de Júlio Verne... e você pudesse passar as páginas para a frente, quando precisasse, para descobrir o que estava para acontecer.

The things that look fixed in this world, child--mountains, wealth, empires--their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

And to Marie Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you're never the same: not quite.

He thinks of the old broken miners he'd see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.

Todo dia, ela tira um tempo para se perder nos reinos da memória...

God's truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of a second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That's God's truth.

You know how diamonds–how all crystals–grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms each month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That's how stories accumulate too. All the old stones accumulate stories.

Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.

Each minute that passes is one fewer in this house. In this life.