quotations about time
Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Time was like someone alongside me who could be unpredictable, could nudge me into something stupid.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
There is a desert of time as well as of land.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
ROBERT FROST
"Acquainted with the Night"
Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces.
CRAIG CALLENDER
Scientific American, June 2010
People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
O time! swift devourer of all created things!
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Love and Time with reverence use,
Treat them like a parting friend:
Nor the golden gifts refuse
Which in youth sincere they send:
For each year their price is more,
And they less simple than before.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
Time wounds all heals.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage County
Time is short. Seventy years in the eye of youthful fancy seems a vast and almost boundless space; but in the estimate of sage experience, and in the full view of eternity, they contract to a span and dwindle to a point.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
They that drive away time spur a free horse.
JOHN MASON
Select Sentences
I think we are what Time may make us--lords
Of wealth and land, or wagemen held at hire;
Turning the years, we gain our toil's desire,
Or lose, inopportune, its high rewards.
KENNETH RAND
"To the Time-God"
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Ye are but actors moved at Time's behest,
And king or slave as shifts the pantomime.
KENNETH RAND
"Sonnet"
We're sitting here and time is going on, and we know what it means to say that time is going on. I don't know what it means to say that time really doesn't pass and it's only in virtue of entropy increasing that it seems to.
TIM MAUDLIN
"A Defense of the Reality of Time", Quanta Magazine, May 16, 2017
Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
STEPHEN KING
The Wind through the Keyhole
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Brodie's Report
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011