Quotes About Time

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.

Open your eyes and see what you can before they close forever.

all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.

every second it feels as if her father slips farther away.

The wheeling of the night on its silent trunnions.

as if the imminent could not wait to become the past, or the present lunged at the future, eager for what would be.

He was numb forever. What clockless hours passed, what weeks and months? He didn't know.

Every cell in a dying body winks out at its own pace.

Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaking it; he'd look at the low dark houses and wandering hens and farmers with their rope belts as if at film from another century.

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

Fishing is about time, he tells Dorotea. It's about how much time you can keep your line in the water. Can't catch fish if your line isn't in the water.

is like an angry hen. The more you chase, the harder it is to catch her. You wait, and be patient, and hope that eventually she comes to you.

Then she begins to move her arms in a short, intricate dance, striking the palm of one hand with the edge of the other, circling her fingers through the air, touching her right ear, finally pointing both index fingers at Joseph. He does not know what to make of it. Her fingers repeat the dance: her hands draw a circle; the palms turn up; the fingers lock. Her lips move but no sound comes out. There is a large silver watch on her wrist which rides up and down her forearm as she gesticulates.

He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said—gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.

The path unspools much too slowly. His fly rod snags on brambles, the fly line is suddenly, immediately, miserably tangled, how do such things happen, how do such horrific tangles suddenly emerge from thin straight lines?

What is time? he wrote in his pad. Must time occur in sequence—beginning to middle to end—or is this only one way to perceive it? Maybe time can spill and freeze and retreat; maybe time is like water, endlessly cycling through its states.

But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time.

Pliny whispers in my ear, 'Different days pass verdict on different men and only the last day a final verdict on all men; and consequently no day is to be trusted.

the way time here feels simultaneously immense and tiny.

We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours—the time we're given on earth—does that belong to us?

Did time move forward, through people, or did people move forward through it, like clouds across the sky?

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.