Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

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.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

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

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

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

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

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

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

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