Time Quotes

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.

~ Margaret Atwood

How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.

~ Elena Ferrante

In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.

~ José Saramago

What a slut time is. She screws with everybody.

~ John Green

There is something magical about the world at night. Sitting at the dining room table, sipping a glass of iced tea, I can totally understand why Dad gets up so early. Minutes seem to last longer when the rest of the world is asleep.

~ A.s. King

The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.

~ Alain De Botton

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.

~ Criss Jami

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

~ Carol Shields

No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!

~ Thomas Mann

How is the duration of a relationship relative to what those involved in it feel?

~ Sreesha Divakaran

We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.

~ Douglas Coupland

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time, though she hadn't understood why... Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world.

~ David Wroblewski

Rare and precious moments, how I long to live with you eternally! If only your sweetness never ceased to touch my lips, and the flutters you evoke nevermore faded away. I dream of your arm extended immeasurably to keep hold of my reaching hand. But Father Time, being a cruel master, will not grant such a wish. And so I tuck you away as cherished memories, stored in a treasure box buried in my heart. And in times of solitude, I shall bring you out to view like rainbows.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I'm convinced that not all units of time are equal.

~ Crystal Woods

We are unable to discount the hypotheses that the world began three years ago.

~ Nagaru Tanigawa

She understands now what she, in all her worry, had forgotten. That even as she hesitates and wavers, even as she thinks too much and moves too cautiously, she doesn't always have to get it right. It's okay to look back, even as you move forward.

~ Jennifer E. Smith

Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

~ Glen Duncan

For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

~ Tom Stoppard

Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment.

~ T.s. Eliot

They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.

~ Scott O'connor

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nightsFour nights will quickly dream away the time.

~ William Shakespeare

To world enough and time.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.

~ Sebastian Faulks

It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.

~ Alastair Bruce

The distance of a voice, is only a short time away from touch.

~ Anthony Liccione

If I could, I would live forever in this moment. But no one can live in a moment, and time moves on.

~ Elora Bishop

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

~ Robert Mckee

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

~ Edith Wharton

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

~ William Landay

I was thinking not very long ago about the difference between the people we grew up with vs. the people we're growing old with - not always being one and the same - and how time (and the memories we forge together) really does strengthen pretty much all of our relationships/friendships (whether they had started on the right foot or not). And I guess what I've mostly learned (by moving to NZ especially) is that the more Significant people you have in your life, the more 'manageable' the idea of loss, losing a loved-one, can become - not because you can replace them (obviously you can't) or because they're interchangeable (no one is), but because like a foundation to a house the more pillars you have (people you love) holding it up (loving you) the more solid/resilient you become - and from there, I find you're better equipped to overcome whatever life throws your way. That said time does pass us by very quickly. I find it much more noticeable through our growing kids than ever before.

~ Kim Dallmeier

I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.

~ Haruki Murakami

Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.

~ Dean Koontz

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...

~ Joseph Brodsky

The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary.

~ Madeline Claire Franklin

It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.

~ Nicole Krauss

They won't be a right be a right time, Thea, it doesn't exist. Just get it over with

~ Catherine Greenman

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

~ Alan Lightman

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

~ John Ashbery