Quotes about time

Yakov counted. He counted time though he tried not to. Counting presupposed an end to counting, at least for a man who used only small numbers. How many times had he counted up to a hundred in his life? Who could count forever? – it piled time on. The fixer had torn some splinters off sticks of firewood. The long splinters were months, the short, days. A day was a bad enough burden of time but within the day even minutes could do damage as they piled up. When one had nothing to do the worst thing to have was an endless supply of minutes. It was like pouring nothing into a million little bottles.

They made two thousand years ago seem like yesterday, and yesterday look like today, just as today would, in time, look like tomorrow. (p. 128).

Ruins—antique ruins at least—are what is left when history has moved on. They are no longer at the mercy of history, only of time. (p. 207).

Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

A winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring.

Still, the Pants promised us there was time. Nothing would be lost. There was all year if we needed it. We had all the way until next summer, when we would take out the Traveling Pants and, together or apart, begin again.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

Time is beginning to flow again.

Americans experience time in two distinct ways—as religious people and as people of no religion. Just so, we experience ourselves as a historical people and as people who are not implicated by history.

The days are long but the years are short.

We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.