quotations about time
Time as he grows old teaches all things.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
interview, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965
Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Fellowship of the Ring
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard II
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
And now, Lord, these things are passed by, and time hath assuaged my wound.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Countess Cathleen
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular -- an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
Some nights--more than I like, lately--I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I'm outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction.
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
CHARLES DARWIN
letter to his sister, Susan Elizabeth Darwin, August 4, 1836
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
Time changes the nature of the whole world;
Everything passes from one state to another
And nothing stays like itself.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
It seems to be not the vast things, but the immense multitude of little, like insects in a forest, which eat up the fruit of time.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays