Quotes about Time

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.

You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.

Her life began to seem long. Her adrenalin was running out. Soon she would be thirty, and all she could see ahead was more of the same.

Any death is stupid from the viewpoint of whoever is undergoing it, Adam One used to say, because no matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it's the universal protest against Time. Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. // The Year of the Flood

there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it.