quotations about time
Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We're safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
Blood of Angels
Normal people experience time as a flow, an infinite cascade of falling dominos, a chain of cause-and-effect events that neither leaps forward several moments nor suddenly reverses, but rather passes with the predictable click-click-click of now moments falling into the next with a steady cadence.
DEREK THOMPSON
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more--let me see--more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Time is a limited commodity and each of us has 24 hours per day. Once you invest that time, it is irretrievable.
SUSAN MURPHY
"'No' Is A Complete Sentence", Forbes, February 20, 2017
The days are such a repetition of each other that they sometimes seem very long, but when one pauses and looks back one starts at the accumulation of departed time, and deplores the swiftness of the seasons.
ROBERT GRANT
"The Romance of a Soul"
Onward and sublime
Will ever glide
The silent stream of Time,
That bears us on its tide.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
Time will unfold its leaves.
GLEN COOK
Warlock
Time matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Science and Human Values
When I was a child, I thought the pageant of the past was still intact and traveling in space at 186,282 miles per second, aboard a science-fiction beam of light under the command of Captain Clock. Not yet having learned how to count time as money, I know the beam of light is time shaped by the force of the human imagination and the powers of its expression (in the languages of art and science but not as the commodity discounted as an abstraction), and I'm content to live temporarily suspended in as many kinds and sorts of time (historical, biological, metaphysical, and mythological) as were my pagan forebears long since descended into the glossy darkness under the turf at Stonehenge.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Captain Clock", Lapham's Quarterly: Time
The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Time passed slowly, like and old man climbing a hill.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Lord of Light
Time is a treasure to the industrious, a burden to the indolent.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was -- only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956