quotations about time
I've always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I've always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I've always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
interview, The Paris Review, spring-summer 1965
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard II
Time as he grows old teaches all things.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church.
JAMES BALDWIN
If Beale Street Could Talk
Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Man seems to be deficient in nothing so much as he is in time.
ZENO
attributed, Day's Collacon
The fluid cradle of events (time).
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
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
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Countess Cathleen
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
It seems to be not the vast things, but the immense multitude of little, like insects in a forest, which eat up the fruit of time.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Time changes the nature of the whole world;
Everything passes from one state to another
And nothing stays like itself.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE
attributed, Thoughts Moral and Divine
The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
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
Previously, Newton considered time to be moving like a straight arrow which unerringly flies forward toward its target. Nothing could deflect or change the course of this arrow once it was shot. Einstein, however, showed that time was more like a mighty river, moving forward but often meandering through twisting valleys and plains. The presence of matter or energy might momentarily shift the direction of the river, but overall the river's course was smooth: It never abruptly ended or jerked backward. However, Gödel showed that the river of time could be smoothly bent backward into a circle. Rivers, after all, have eddy currents and whirlpools. In the main, a river may flow forward, but at the edges there are always side pools where water flows in a circular motion.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace