quotations about time
Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
STEPHEN KING
The Wind through the Keyhole
Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,
Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS
"Hyperion: A Fragment"
Time wounds all heals.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage County
Time, so complain'd of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimm'd hours.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Consolation"
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
BHARTRHARI
"Time"
Anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
One must work with time and not against it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T. S. ELIOT
"Burnt Norton", Four Quartets
Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
It rolls in grandeur lone--
The stream of Time;
And on its shores lie strown
The wrecks of every clime.
HARVEY RICE
"The Stream of Time"
My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Mask of Anarchy
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
Time means less than the color of zero.
RAVEN GREGORY
Alice in Wonderland, issue #1, January 2012
Time is the longest distance between two places.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Glass Menagerie
Perhaps we expect time to work for us, when time is only given us that we may work.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Laicus: Or, The Experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Time is the father of mutability.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon