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2129844 It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well. time humor perspective Terry Pratchett
4ad2761 Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time. time Julian Barnes
2f26762 Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly. time Fernando Pessoa
81863c4 I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things. time life wine Ernest Hemingway
38e4c27 This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'... time history Julian Barnes
4242801 'n lHzn swf ytDl fy wqt m , Ht~ wlw lm ytlsh~ tmman , lknh b`d ftr@ ln ykwn shdydan time sadness Nicholas Sparks
36d2e14 The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause. time Umberto Eco
42d903c You can't give up. You can't ever give up. If you give up you might as well be dead. time loial rand wheel Robert Jordan
6b5e1c9 Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn't matter: that pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm time William Faulkner
7863e1f Time doesn't run backward, you know, and things that have been done can't be undone, no matter how hard you wish. time regret Mary Downing Hahn
cea4564 We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day. time light past wisdom eurydice day matrix dystopia Margaret Atwood
4561ed8 Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason. time Jeffrey Eugenides
71d7043 She had the bizarre feeling of time bending all around her, as though she was from the past reading about the future, or from the future reading about the past. time reading past Mohsin Hamid
6c6d7ad My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought. sleep time silence thought Markus Zusak
c715192 Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator. Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight. present time past Tom Robbins
7161525 What exactly did people do when they had all the time in the world and could do whatever they liked? (p 153) time Sharon Creech
6f013b4 Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does. time mind memory John Steinbeck
5b79365 You really loved her?' 'I would have given my life.' 'Would you have taken it?' 'No, child,' he said. 'That is not ours to do. time love Mitch Albom
50ba817 It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself. time satori mysticism Roger Zelazny
14a490b This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time. time living-life museums timelessness Orhan Pamuk
32b295a I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time. time Leo Tolstoy
3a9643f n wqtn `l~ hdhh l'rD mqds , w`lyn lHtf bkl lHZ@ time Paulo Coelho
c5344f8 In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it. time science passing-of-time time-travel Michael Crichton
2539cb2 Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. time the-war-of-the-worlds space science-fiction H.G. Wells
1f154e4 For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world - legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea - scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. dance time music Anthony Powell
d1c215d All objects exist in a moment of time. time object Amy Tan
3a092a6 I'm a great reader that never has time to read. time reading free-time readers Eudora Welty
a7d1657 It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough. time memoryes remember remembering Richard Llewellyn
f84efb8 He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses, and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moaning of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And the time was gone forever. time locomotive sound Denis Johnson
8a2cea9 In the silence of the woods it felt like I could hear the passage of time, of life passing by. One person leaves, another appears. A thought flits away and another takes its place. One image bids farewell and another one appears on the scene. As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished. I just sat there in front of the hole, listening to the sound of time dying. time transient Haruki Murakami
b0ee35a From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms. time worms wanting unhappy unicorn forest restless restlessness leaving peace unicorns Peter S. Beagle
2aa730d And never, never, dear madam, put 'Wednesday' simply as the date! madness time Lewis Carroll
6e62783 I am talking to you, but the moment I am talking to you, the universe is being created and destroyed. universe time Paulo Coelho
a2c0764 Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer. time neville the-waves virginia-woolf Virginia Woolf
f434f35 But time is short, and science is infinite... time science life Thomas Hardy
4fe9887 The next visit I paid to Nancy Brown was in the second week in March: for, though I had many spare minutes during the day, I seldom could look upon an hour as entirely my own; since, when everything was left to the caprices of Miss Matilda and her sister, there could be no order or regularity. Whatever occupation I chose, when not actually busied about them or their concerns, I had, as it were, to keep my loins girded, my shoes on my feet, and my staff in my hand; for not to be immediately forthcoming when called for, was regarded as a grave and inexcusable offence: not only by my pupils and their mother, but by the very servant, who came in breathless haste to call me, exclaiming 'You're to go to the school-room directly, mum- the young ladies is WAITING!!' Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess!!! time waiting Anne Brontë
b163fca Time will tell, I suppose, or at least, these pages will. time tell Markus Zusak
1d380b5 Life could be horrible in the wrong trouser of time. time humor parallel-universe Terry Pratchett
47ad36b Time turns our lies into truths. time truth Gene Wolfe
1c9a779 Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away. time Gregory Maguire
e3d5dd6 Is Dust immortal then, I ask'd him, so that we may see it blowing through the Centuries? But as Walter gave no Answer I jested with him further to break his Melancholy humour: What is Dust, Master Pyne? And he reflected a little: It is particles of Matter, no doubt. Then we are all Dust indeed, are we not? And in a feigned Voice he murmered, For Dust thou art and shalt to Dust return. Then he made a Sour face, but only yo laugh the more. time history dust london Peter Ackroyd
7e093c0 "Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience--but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry." time reality now time-passing physics Paul Davies
12df075 We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always-- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. time poetry T.S. Eliot
51f5a47 We had been separated by time and distance and events so long, it was as if we had to get to know each other again, but if it was possible to fall in love with the same person twice, I did. time love landry pearl-in-the-mist v-c-andrews withstand distance possibilities lust V.C. Andrews
676c51c And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money. money time Douglas Coupland
e783b7b For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse. time history writer reader Peter Ackroyd
8b32c78 A journey is time suspended. time Louis L'Amour
f57895c Old terror crouched in the shadows. It was one of the most ancient terrors, the one that meant that no sooner had mankind learned to walk on two legs than it dropped to its knees. It was the terror of impermanence, the knowledge that all this would pass away, that a beautiful voice or a wonderful figure was something whose arrival you couldn't control and whose departure you couldn't delay. time Terry Pratchett
a10c676 Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal. time reality Tahir Shah
d781a8e "Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things." "Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?" "No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns." time unicorn changes Peter S. Beagle
99e328f Time is only linear for engineers and referees. time relativity Craig Ferguson
19e5b51 Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond. time Margaret Atwood
df672e2 How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring. time women ray-bradbury Ray Bradbury
e19a724 I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness. time thoughtfulness slow reflection thinking walking modernity technology Rebecca Solnit
74c5071 "To quote a famous philosopher revered in my time 'But this is no different from regular life. When have you ever known what's going to happen in the future?'" Wait a minute, Jonah thought. I said that. Back at Westminster, with Katherine. Does that mean I'm going to be a famous philosopher in the future? Does that mean I'm going to be revered? There wasn't time to ask." time quote life revered philosopher time-travel Margaret Peterson Haddix
15bc020 The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt! One of them had to stop burning. The sun wouldn't, certainly. So it looked as if it had to be Montag and the people he had worked with until a few short hours ago. Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches. time books records transience preservation Ray Bradbury
bbbfe8c Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean. tragedy time youth beauty death shabby wrinkled grow mean old young die Raymond Chandler
7c0ac92 Only, we must allow time. But our demands as far as time is concerned are no less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change will have been spent by our own heart in changing itself too, so that when the goal we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to be our goal. Besides, the very idea that it will be attainable, that there is no happiness that, when it has ceased to be a happiness for us, we cannot ultimately attain, contains an element, but only an element, of truth. It falls to us when we have grown indifferent to it. But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and enabled us in retrospect to feel convinced that it would have delighted us had it come at a time when perhaps it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate. time Marcel Proust
ef82619 Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time. time history death life human-spirit creativity Jeanette Winterson
e95310e "When I say I want time to think, I want time to think!" Jonathan sighed wearily. "All right, you've had time to think. What's your answer?" "That I need more time to think!" time jon proposals Tamora Pierce (Author)
f66f030 God really performs the miracle of multiplying our time, but only if we give it to him first. time god making-time-for-prayer Peter Kreeft
3c97254 Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain. time rain river Gene Wolfe
be395ba What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. time work death anachronisms permanence sociology revolution technology Alain de Botton
5a06f34 When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. present time music now time-passing present-moment Ruth Ozeki
8982bb4 "Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. "Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wicket gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through. "What is it?" she asked. "Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?" "It could be," smiled the woman. "There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one." Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms. "Why only now, tonight?" asked Deborah. "Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?" "It's a trick," said the woman. "You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We're always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick's easier by night, that's all." "Am I dreaming, then?" asked Deborah. "No," said the woman, "this isn't a dream. And it isn't death, either. It's the secret world." The secret world... It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart. "Of course..." she said, "of course..." and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge. ("The Pool")" time dream secret death imagination fantasy innocence knowledge night creativity Daphne du Maurier
d6e7377 To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[...]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy. time life rhythms Tom Robbins
5b7d4ca a long time ago when cataclysms were common as sneezes and land masses slid around the globe looking for places to settle down and become continents, someone introduced us at a party. time love forever-love forever Billy Collins
16a1350 A Warrior of the Light does not waste his time listening to provocations; he has a destiny to fulfill. time light provocations listening warrior Paulo Coelho
2dd1419 I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life. time loss hope Edward Gibbon
eaca0ad The world is a cancer eating itself away... I am think that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. time silence reality music tropic-of-cancer henry-miller chaos reality-of-life Henry Miller
17ca03f ... time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out. time José Saramago
6eff941 But emotion had come upon him after all. Not for fifty billion people. What in Time did he care for fifty billion people? There was just one. One person. time Isaac Asimov
6cc6586 Time is a random thing. It is the thing that makes us older. Humans use it to organize the world. They have invented a system to try to make order from randomness. The other humans, all of them but me, live their lives by hours and minutes and days and seconds, but those things are nothing. The universe would laugh at our attempts to organize it, if it could be bothered to notice them. Time is the thing that makes our bodies shrivel and decay. That is why people are scared of it. universe time Emily Barr
12e871f The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure. time wisdom William Blake
2b1589d ...at such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear. In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, time to appear to run forwards because the 'future' is the only place you can see an escape from this intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn't move. And if time isn't running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You're buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events. time panic-attacks Sebastian Faulks
b4082fe "What else can you tell me?" Dad stares at me. "What have you learned while you were awake?" I learned that life is so, so fragile. I learned that you can know someone for just days and never forget the impression he left on you. I learned that art can be beautiful and sad at the same time. I learned that if someone loves you, he'll wait for you to love him back. I learned that how much you want something doesn't determine whether you get it or not, that "no" might not be enough, that life isn't fair, that my parents can't save me, that maybe no one can. "Nothing much," I mutter." time life colonel-martin shades-of-earth unfair nothing dad fragile chaos art save hard mess sad Beth Revis
99b614b She shall be my queen, and I her most ardent admirer and protector. A new standard of love shall be established for the ages. Time will clarify my devotion! On this I would gladly stake my very soul! time love devotion ages queen standard soul Brandon Mull
7c390c5 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. time past waste Carol Shields
c2957bb Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it. time live life truth wait see mess Robin Hobb
7b3d2a9 Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever. time history writing reality past change capture fade fled hold-on preserve write remember flower Robin Hobb
c8c8ee7 Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more. time Milan Kundera
aecca94 Experiences is just paying attention as time passes. time Erin McKean
343fb48 Measured against eternity, our time on earth is just a blink of an eye... time eternity Rick Warren
b8318fe Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind. time youth Stefan Zweig
4655b3b Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. time sadness moon space sky Margaret Atwood
219da50 If you have food in your jaws you have solved all questions for the time being. time solved questions jaws Franz Kafka
ff3ab8a Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. time Julian Barnes
f80a855 Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones. time mind discovery poetry science fossils cuvier discoverer feeble george-byron george-gordon-byron george-gordon-noel george-gordon-noel-byron georges-cuvier historian montmartre treatise urals lord-byron immensity civilization geology space genius natural turmoil poet memory Honoré de Balzac
e4b4cdc So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. time meaning Iris Murdoch
c052e5d One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. time liquid Cormac McCarthy
571babc Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn't to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It's easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you've made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone's such a thing; it just sits there and you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. time telephones phones technology Ray Bradbury
f7f9841 This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. the afternoon. You can't take it with you. time living-life-to-the-fullest time-passing Annie Dillard
bfda900 Time makes us pointless. time Sebastian Faulks
0bdb6ce When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just a single theme; he will come to realise it only when his life begins to enact its first variations. time Milan Kundera
ca467d9 - V Apokalipsisa angel't se k'lne, che veche niama da ima vreme. - Znam. Tova tam e mnogo viarno; iasno i tochno. Kogato chovek't dostigne shchastieto, niama da ima veche vreme, zashchoto ne e nuzhno. Mnogo viarna mis'l. - K'de shche go dianat? - Nik'de niama da go diavat. Vremeto ne e predmet, a ideia. Shche ugasne v uma. time mind angel vreme um apocalypse Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6dbf94d Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses. photography time dream future past imagination life snapshot kodak-moment pause clear clarity worry moment regret nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
8091983 I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present. time mortality death generations Annie Dillard
dc739bc Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? time watch Julian Barnes
f40351e He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for any common happening to survive. time tension Mervyn Peake
556367c We'll let time knit these gentle ties between us. time Molière
d839fda That's one benefit of travelling to your own future, and making the trip part of your past. time lessons future past philosophy decisions James A. Owen
c0ac46a We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. present time history past family life build-up chronology development generation-gap existentialism modernity Wallace Stegner
49f46c0 Anna is part of a generation that often seems frozen in place by their unreleting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still. time growing-up Scott Turow
a68eb2d Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time. solitude time silence travel explore wanderlust Rebecca Solnit
1753fe9 Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54] time memory Augustine of Hippo
d8a5db1 The calendar is a human invention; time does not exist on the spiritual level. time Isabel Allende
ce2a8de Morning seems to come earlier every year I live. time life John Steinbeck
0d111d6 They say Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one your never had in mind. time Khaled Hosseini
32e20f3 I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond. And their eyes were my eyes. As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as tomorrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father's hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and is not yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one, born of Woman, Son of Man, had in the Image, fashioned in the Womb by the Will of God, the eternal Father. I was one of them, they were of me, and in me, and I in all of them. time family-history family-line geneology lineage forefathers Richard Llewellyn
59954c0 Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. time John Steinbeck
3407c7e The Bible said, as Chris quoted one memorable day, there was a time for everything. I figured my time for happiness was just ahead, waiting for me. time happiness waiting V.C. Andrews
3312848 The beauty of the day is the only thing that doesn't fade in time. Day after day, such beauty revives itself. time revival Gregory Maguire
0a17ba4 Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. time nature simplicity-in-life simplicity Henry David Thoreau
864c29e The full moon symbol on my calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting time. time Charlaine Harris
d0b9438 Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another. time Jeanette Winterson
0364721 But time heals. Or at least it forms scabs. time scab Neil Gaiman
32733af A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one. time night David Mitchell
0daca47 And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes? I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then. time Neil Gaiman
79250c9 But he had been the victim of the world's most common crime--his youth had been kidnapped by a thing called time. It had likely also been raped, dismembered, and buried somewhere never to be seen again time youth Aurelio Voltaire
0ac11a2 "Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences--red spot, green spot--smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book , philosopher points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?" time reality phi-phenomenon now time-passing psychology Paul Davies
2616d70 Surviving dangerous times require a sense of humor. time sense-of-humor Robert Ferrigno
092b608 Time and sunshine healed a sore, but the process was slow, and new boils appeared if I didn't stay dry. metaphor time pain suffering life-of-pi Yann Martel
4d9a672 Here I stand on the brink of war again, a citizen of no place, no time, no country but my own . . . and that a land lapped by no sea but blood, bordered only by the outlines of a face long-loved. time war love james-fraser lyrical uncertainty Diana Gabaldon
7c67009 It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. 'Oh,' Izzie said, 'You're at an age when a girl is simply by the sublime.' Ursula wasn't sure what she meant ('No one is ever sure what she means,' Sylvie said) but she thought she understood a little. There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of that made Ursula's chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness - she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time. time future teenage-years teenage-girl summer Kate Atkinson
7b8693d The lonesome dark. That's what Jack called a night like this. When you were distanced from everything and everybody. Out on your own and there was nobody to care if you were happy or sad. If you lived or died. The lonesome dark hadn't existed in the old days. That was something people invented. Like time. Parcel up the days, parcel up the seasons. Add a minute here, a day there when it doesn't quite fit. Trim the square peg so that you could slide it into the round hole. In the old days the night was as open as the day. It wasn't a better place to hide because there was nothing to hide from. You weren't outside because there was no in. time round-hole square-peg outside Charles de Lint
49bef17 "...Do you think there's somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?" Mandy blurted out. "You mean when you die, where will you end up?" Alecto asked her. "...I wouldn't know... back to whatever void there is, I suppose." "I've thought about it... every living thing dies alone, it'll be lonely after death," Mandy sighed sadly. "That freaks me out, does it scare you?" "I don't want to be alone," Alecto replied wearily. "We won't be, though. We'll be dead, so we'll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness." "I don't want to be any of that either though," Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. "When we die, we'll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything'll just be nothing!" "You're real though, at least that's something," Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly." time grief heaven depression death imagination sadness truth frightened disturbing grim spooky nirvana funeral purgatory void misery scary kill dead lost dying nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
744aa49 The photograph is in my hand. It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park, in 1959. In twelve seconds time, I drop the photograph to the sand at my feet, walking away. It's already lying there, twelve seconds into the future. Ten seconds now. The photograph is in my hand. I found it in a derelict bar at the gila flats test base, twenty-seven hours ago. It's still there, twenty-seven hours into the past, in its frame, in the darkened bar. I'm still there, looking at it. The photograph is in my hand. The woman takes a piece of popcorn between thumb and forefinger. The ferris wheel pauses. Seven seconds now. It's October, 1985. I'm on Mars. It's July, 1959. I'm in New Jersey, at the Palisades Amusement Park. Four seconds, three. I'm tired of looking at the photograph now. I open my fingers. It falls to the sand at my feet. I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away. And their light takes so long to reach us... All we ever see of stars are their old photohraphs. time old star Alan Moore
66e90b6 Men who work at Time have a life expectancy which is not long said the young man from Newsweek time time-magazine Norman Mailer
40b2f59 And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again. time Francine Prose
a82afaa you find yourself repeating, 'They grow up so quickly, don't they?' when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. time Julian Barnes
b1c1ec4 Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve? time personality history philosophy mellow merit memory nostalgia Julian Barnes
bf77968 But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. time i-am-because space Vladimir Nabokov
e8a3890 I ought not to have stirred, I was swept into the dance, caught up in the whirling movement of things. Being in Time means running after the present. You run after things, you run with things, you flow away. time centeredness fleetingness Eugène Ionesco
b9f7a66 Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. time literature history life Julian Barnes
c78d431 Lords of space and Lords of time, Lords of blessing, Lords of grace, Who is in the warmer clime? Who will follow Madoc's rhyme? Blue will alter time and space. time grade rhyme space Madeleine L'Engle
bdb88f8 What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that secondhand overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship! time humor Mervyn Peake
60be6fd "We came back [from Mars]," Pris said, "because nobody should have to live there. It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age. Anyhow, at first I got drugs from Roy; I lived for that new synthetic pain-killer, that silenizine. And then I met Horst Hartman, who at that time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps; there's so much time on your hands that you've got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly. And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction." "You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before - " "The writers," Pris said, "made it up." "Based on what?" "On imagination. A lot of times they turned out wrong [...] Anyhow, there's a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to be like. Canals." "Canals?" Dimly, he remembered reading about that; in the olden days they had believed in canals on Mars. "Crisscrossing the planet," Pris said. "And beings from other stars. With infinite wisdom. And stories about Earth, set in our time and even later. Where there's no radioactive dust." [...] "Did you bring any of that pre-colonial reading material back with you?" It occurred to him that he ought to try some. "It's worthless, here, because here on Earth the craze never caught on. Anyhow there's plenty here, in the libraries; that's where we get all of ours - stolen from libraries here on Earth and shot by autorocket to Mars. You're out at night humbling across the open space, and all of a sudden you see a flare, and there's a rocket, cracked open, with old pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. A fortune. But of course you read them before you sell them." She warmed to her topic. "Of all -" time science-fiction Philip K. Dick
2da0e11 Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went. time life midlife-crisis ageing old aging Philip K. Dick
c86b20a We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time. time Sebastian Faulks
3a9b394 But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time. time islands places Lawrence Durrell
e569268 Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper's stopwatch. fate time destiny Vladimir Nabokov
5c6b13f "I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time--but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was "productive." Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted." time productivity Gretchen Rubin
a149470 He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look. This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We're seeing back in time. No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today. No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you're seeing is time. Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart. What we're seeing is space. It's space, yes, he said. It's also time. You're seeing what has already happened. time time-travel time-passing Aimee Bender
5c6cdf0 I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all. time youth past Margaret Atwood
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