quotations about time
By the 1930s, wristwatches were the norm and the pocket watch was an anachronism. Time, itself, had become a human appendage.
DEREK THOMPSON
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/t/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37
"A Brief Economic History of Time", The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
Time's flying wheel leaves little trace behind.
ISAAC MCLELLAN
"Musings"
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
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
That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail--but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place?
K. J. PARKER
The Escapement
Time has ghosts. That's what time is: the ghost of every instant passed, haunting the potential of every moment to come.
TIM LEBBON
Fears Unnamed
How Time doth lash us with sharp pains,
Set loose our teeth, snatch wisps of hair, dim eyes --
And finally bend our backs toward earth
To find the fittest place for burial.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Of Time", Cloudrifts at Twilight
The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend.
DAVID GERROLD
Under the Eye of God
A proper disposition of time leaves a man at leisure in the very bustle of affairs; without delaying the attention of his concerns to the last or giving them unnecessary application at first: it affords a season for everything by affording everything its proper season.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
But to say there was a time when time was not, is as absurd as to say there was a man when there was no man.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
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
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time, for a man who has never truly felt a second of it, is not a great sacrifice.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Conquest of Happiness
For though time may seem to drag slowly on
Before you will know it, time will be gone.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Voice of the Clock"
Time is a trust, and for every minute of it you will have to account.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
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
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf