Time Quotes

It's funny, I don't feel any older than I did when I was twenty. But I know I am, because recently some twenty-year-old called me 'sir.' Sometimes the only way you know you are getting older is by the way others treat you.

~ John Van Epp

There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.

~ T.s. Eliot

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.

~ Wendell Berry

Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

~ Lauren Oliver

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

~ Ian Mcewan

Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.

~ George Kubler

When days seem like years and years feel like days.

~ Robert Brown Fulford

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

~ Mark Doty

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.

~ Larry Niven

Time doesn't heal all wounds, only distance can lessen the sting of them.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

~ Arnold Bennett

Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

~ James Joyce

You can’t buy time, Nick. Ever. It’s the only thing in life you can’t get most of, and it’s the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it’s gone. It takes no pity on no soul and no heart.

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.

~ Arthur Machen

The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.

~ Steve Toltz

Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn't really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety.

~ Deepak Chopra

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.

~ Clive Barker

Day is just a collection of hours.

~ Serj Tankian

...the only difference between a young person at the height of their exuberance and a very old person who is frail and physically wasted is time.

~ John O'donohue

I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.

~ Anne Rice

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

We have to forego some good things in order to choose others that are better or best because they develop faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and strengthen our families.

~ Dallin H. Oaks

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

~ Stanisław Lem

Time heals even the deepest wounds.

~ Sharon E. Rainey

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.

~ C.s. Lewis

Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

~ C.s. Lewis

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

~ Alan Bennett

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

~ Roland Barthes

A while ago?” Anaxantis asked. “Yes, he raped me a while ago. Exactly nine months and two days ago. What's that? Nine months or nine minutes. It's the same. And it is in the past, you say? Then why is it still happening, every day, every time I close my eyes? Every time I hear someone behind me, and I don't know who it is? How is it that I get an almost irresistible urge to kill anyone who happens to touch me unexpectedly? Tell me, Hemarchidas, how do I forgive, let alone forget, something that is still happening, that keeps happening over and over? How? How do I do that?

~ Andrew Ashling

Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.

~ Hermann Hesse

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.

~ Jessica Khoury

Nothing makes time pass or shortens the way like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance.

~ Alexandre Dumas

There is so little time. We need to make every moment count.

~ Shannon Delany

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

If the whole world I once could seeOn free soil stand, with the people freeThen to the moment might I say,Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe