This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs - what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else.

You don't see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward.

It is not the present which influences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.

She said the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

When our time ends on its rictus smile, we'll pass the lure of fortune.

You have been educated in judgment, which is the essence of worship. Judgment always occurs in the past. It is past-thinking. Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future. Thinking is the performance of the moment, out of which you use your judgment to modulate will. You are a convection center through which past prepares future. —Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, from Conversations with the Avata

He knew this was among the alternatives today, a fact along lines of the future radiating from this position in time-space.

You had to pick and choose, discreetly animating the past. And was that not the purpose of consciousness, the very essence of being alive? Select from the past and match it against the present: Learn consequences.

There's no substitute for time in solving many problems,' Leto said. 'However, you can place too much reliance on it. I can accept no more delays.

And he wondered: What is the now?

Moneo is trapped. He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

I have little to do with how you'll meet tomorrow, Gurney Halleck. I can only help you meet today.