Quotes about Time

Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it is not even past.

The thing about getting old, Bar," Toot had told me, "is that you're the same person inside." I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. "You're trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it's still you. You understand?

History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.

I was talking to my lawyer and he was saying we have to meet with somebody right away because they really want to get something done. I said, okay, how about tomorrow? He said, 'Well no, it's going to take at least two weeks.' And I had to explain, 'Where I'm from, right away means if we don't do something in half an hour somebody dies.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

Plus," Tig said, "it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting." "For people to die?" "Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.