The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.

This is Year Zero.

The past is always tense and the future, perfect.

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.