Archive

Quotes

We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.

—Joseph Addison, 1711

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975

They say, “We only have the life of this world. We die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time.” Yet, not true knowledge have they of this—only belief.

—The Qur’an, c. 620

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

—Charles Lamb, 1810

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.

—John Quincy Adams, 1844

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive. 

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

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

—Novalis, c. 1798

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, 1989

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

—Simone Weil, 1947

A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

—Jane Austen, 1814

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

—Tennessee Williams, 1951