TIME QUOTES VI
quotations about time
Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Still Time, great wizard of this earth,
Who holds o'er human minds such sway!
Oft bids to scenes of later birth
Old recollections to give way.
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"Florinda"
Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
CESARE PAVESE
"Morning Star over Calabria"
Time perfects men as well as destroys them.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
We grasp at Time, but cannot hold
One minute of his treasured hour;
He tarries not, though oft we pray
That he will rest in youth's bright bower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Time's Ravages"
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have.
ROLLO MAY
Man's Search for Himself
In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
How unthinking must those unhappy persons be, who make it a common excuse for idle and pernicious amusements, that they do it to kill Time.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
How rapidly time urges his flight; sometimes as a relentless, unsparing destroyer; but oftener as a swift-winged and beautiful angel; changing, yet not taking away this world's blessings: making our past sorrows look dim in the distance; opening many flowers of pleasure on our way, and gradually ripening our souls for the great eternity.
WILLIAM CHAMBERS
The Herald of Gospel Liberty, September 22, 1921
Time depends on the position of the observer and the direction in which he looks.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Take care of the minutes, and the days will take care of themselves.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time sure kicks the shit out of people.
DAN SIMMONS
Lovedeath
Time never works. It eats, and undermines, and rots, and rusts, and destroys. But it never works. It only gives us an opportunity to work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
For more than two thousand years, the world's great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured--and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?
ALAN BURDICK
"The Secret Life of Time", The New Yorker, December 19, 2016
Time is the very lens through which ye see -- small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope -- something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.
C. S. LEWIS
The Great Divorce
The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.
SEAN M. CARROLL
Scientific American, June 2008