quotations about time
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
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
One must work with time and not against it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Time time time is a riddle
My oh my I can figure it out
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
In a thornless cathederal
Is barely moving a needle at all
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
LUKE SITAL-SINGH
"Time Is a Riddle"
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard II
Time is the father of mutability.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
said to have been composed on the night before his execution, "Even Such Is Time"
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 ... antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents
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
O time! swift devourer of all created things!
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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
Time doesn't really heal, it just makes you not to give a crap.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second
Let every man be master of his time.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Macbeth
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. ELIOT
"Burnt Norton", Four Quartets
We do live and breathe,
And we are gone. The spoiler heeds us not.
We have our spring-time and our rottenness;
And as we fall, another race succeeds.
To perish likewise--Meanwhile Nature smiles--
The seasons run their round--The Sun fulfils
His annual course--and heaven and earth remain
Still changing, yet unchanged--still doom'd to feel
Endless mutation in perpetual rest.
Where are concealed the days which have elapsed?
Hid in the mighty cavern of THE PAST,
They rise upon us only to appal,
By indistinct and half-glimpsed images,
Misty, gigantic, huge, obscure, remote.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE
"Time", The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS
"Hyperion: A Fragment"
Time, so complain'd of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimm'd hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"