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

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

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.

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.

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