c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The river is now. This moment. This breath between us. The space between your heartbeats. The moment before you blink. The instant a thought flashes through your mind. It is everything that is around us. Life. Energy. Flowing, endlessly flowing, carrying you from then...to now...to tomorrow. Listen: you can hear the music of it. Of the passage of time.
— Lisa Mangum
The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
— Anton Chekhov, The Witch and Other Stories
Any time gone by was better.
— Jorge Manrique
Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Perhaps time’s definition of coal is the diamond.
— Kahlil Gibran
Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.
— Julia Glass, Three Junes
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
— Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
Time wounds all heals.
— Tracy Letts, August: Osage County
It doesn't really matter if you are left behind the back, but what matters is your capacity to pull and push everyone by your way to get to the front.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.
— Stanisław Lem, Highcastle: A Remembrance
Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
Every moment is a crossroad in time. Consider that, as above so below and as inside so outside and live accordingly.
— Grigoris Deoudis
Everyone thinks that the old days were better, or that they were harder, and the modern times are chaotic and complex, or easier all around, but I think people's hearts have always been the same, happy and sad, and that hasn't changed at all. It's just the shapes of lives that change, not the lives themselves.
— Brian  Doyle, Mink River
The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.
— Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre / Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent / Agnes Grey
It will happen but it will take time.
— John Bowlby
Look back on Time, with kindly eyes -He doubtless did his best -How softly sinks that trembling sunIn Human Nature's West -
— Emily Dickinson
Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.
— Roger Zelazny, Isle of the Dead
He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.
— Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
The woman recovering from abuse or other stressful life situations may feel she's in no way in charge of anything, least of all her own world. She faces the horse with trepidation. The horse senses the fear and becomes tense and concerned. The wise instructor starts small. The woman is handed a soft brush and sent to fuss over the horse. It's pointed out that if she stands close to the animal, she will be out of range of a well-aimed kick. She is warned to watch for tell-tale signs of fear in herself and the horse. She's warned to keep her feet out from under the horse's stomping hoof. They're both allowed to back away and regroup and try again until they reach an accord regarding personal space. Calm prevails, and within a few minutes, hours or sessions, interaction becomes friendship. It happens almost every time a woman is allowed enough time and space to work through the situation.So a woman whose daily life is overwhelming her learns to step back. Is this a cure for her endless problems? Of course not. Simple is not simplistic.
— Joanne M. Friedman, Horses in the Yard
If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being--ever mindful of its personal style.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last.
— Prince, 1999 (Piano/Vocal/Guitar)
I think you will agree that life's plans are not always tied up in neat little packages. Occasionally we find ourselves at unexpected crossroads with more than one opportunity from which to choose. Time itself is often the best indicator of which decision to make, for it can tell so many thing that are now hazy.
— Linda Lee Chaikin, Tomorrow's Treasure
You don't have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don't have what you want now, you don't have what you want.
— Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Most of the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing.
— Lauren Oliver
The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering.  'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.
— Roman Payne, Hope and Despair
The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
The TelephoneWhen I was just as far as I could walkFrom here todayThere was an hourAll stillWhen leaning with my head against a flowerI heard you talk.Don't say I didn't for I heard you sayYou spoke from that flower on the window sill-Do you remember what it was you said ''First tell me what it was you thought you heard.''Having found the flower and driven a bee awayI leaned my headAnd holding by the stalkI listened and I thought I caught the wordWhat was itDid you call me by my name Or did you saySomeone said "Come"I heard it as I bowed.''I may have thought as much but not aloud.'Well so I came.
— Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one’s body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty.
— Jim Carroll, The Petting Zoo
I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.
— Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling
For he lives twice who can at once employ,The present well, and e’en the past enjoy.
— Alexander Pope
O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning!It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,I will have thousands of globes and all time.
— Walt Whitman
All objects exist in a moment of time.
— Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
— Adam Gopnik
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
— Charles Caleb Colton
Some days some times are remembered by me, in life’s all moments they are cherished by me
— Amit Abraham
If we accept time for what it is, how it flows and how we flow with it, I doubt very much that we would continue wasting loads of it by constantly checking our watches. The gnomons's shadow falls where it falls - and so do we. Where we are now is where a lifetime's worth of steps have taken us.
— Samantha Sotto, Before Ever After
How can you say: "I love you forever!" ; Whereas bit of time can change everything
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
Time's never up", she whispered, not looking at me, but at my canvas. "Just like there's always time for pain, there's always time for healing. Of course there is.
— Jennifer Brown, Hate List
From time to time, one must release the grime built up inside them to to free their emotions like the ocean.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine it loses its grip. 
— Bernard Beckett, Genesis
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
— G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered
Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense. 
— James Sallis, Black Hornet
Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.
— Dara Horn, The World to Come
Depression, as far as I'm concerned, is just a waste of time.
— Helen Reddy
The only problem is time.
— Seth MacFarlane
What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?
— Clyde DeSouza, Memories With Maya
Opportunity makes the man
— José de Alencar
Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.
— Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories
Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours...
— Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2
Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
A journey is time suspended.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths:  Selected Stories and Other Writings
A relationship takes place between two people across space and time, and suddenly no one seems like a stranger.
— Vatsal Surti, On Love
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.
— Jonathan Nolan, Memento mori
Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.
— Jane Austen, Emma
You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.
— Jonathan Nolan, Memento mori
To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
— Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Dimanchophobia:Fear of Sundays, not in a religious sense but rather, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety. Not to be confused with didominicaphobia, or kyriakephobia, fear of the Lord's Day.Dimanchophobia is a mental condition created by modernism and industrialism. Dimanchophobes particularly dislike the period between Christmas and New Year's, when days of the week lose their significance and time blurs into a perpetual Sunday. Another way of expressing dimanchophobia might be "life in a world without calendars." A popular expression of this condition can be found in the pop song "Every Day is Like Sunday," by Morrissey, in which he describes walking on a beach after a nuclear way, when every day of the week now feels like Sunday.
— Douglas Coupland
One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.
— Burkhard Bilger
Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young.
— Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
— Oscar Wilde
Time stretches and calms, but still we reach, for we belonged then. We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be.
— Mark Mustian, The Gendarme
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion.
— Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
TIMETimeAnd how it slips through my fingersWithout putting its ring on them,And I remain simply its lover
— Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
Listen to the time as it can heal everything.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Blood had long since ceased to beat from one end to the other, but one could sense, from passages marked with fresher traces of wheels and hooves, that once the meaning and even the very idea of a long journey was lost, sleep had not descended over it in one fell swoop: it had continued to steal a march here and there, in a discontinuous way, and over short distances, like a laborer who feels his cart jolt on a section of Roman road that crosses his field...
— Julien Gracq
At every single moment, the whole creation is beginning again, stretching the tent of the present moment to bursting. And the waves that push up through the oceans, and the waves that push up through the stars; and the waves that push upwards through history are the same waves that push up through us. And so we have to say yes to time, even though it means speeding forward into memory; forgetfulness; and oblivion. Say “no” to time; hold on to what you were or what she was; hold onto the past, even out of love... and I swear it will tear you to shreds. This universe will tear you to shreds.
— Craig Wright, The Pavilion - Acting Edition
For love was a kind of folly, a losing game. The greatest of all Wastes of Time. But then, that depended on what you thought time was for.
— Cassandra Golds, The Museum of Mary Child
There was a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.
— Sadie Jones, The Outcast
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.
— Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.
— José Saramago, Seeing
What a slut time is. She screws with everybody.
— John Green
There is something magical about the world at night. Sitting at the dining room table, sipping a glass of iced tea, I can totally understand why Dad gets up so early. Minutes seem to last longer when the rest of the world is asleep.
— A.S. King, Everybody Sees the Ants
The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.
— Alain de Botton
We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.
— Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
How is the duration of a relationship relative to what those involved in it feel?
— Sreesha Divakaran, A Little Chorus of Love
We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.
— Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time, though she hadn't understood why... Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Rare and precious moments, how I long to live with you eternally! If only your sweetness never ceased to touch my lips, and the flutters you evoke nevermore faded away. I dream of your arm extended immeasurably to keep hold of my reaching hand. But Father Time, being a cruel master, will not grant such a wish. And so I tuck you away as cherished memories, stored in a treasure box buried in my heart. And in times of solitude, I shall bring you out to view like rainbows.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
I'm convinced that not all units of time are equal.
— Crystal Woods, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
We are unable to discount the hypotheses that the world began three years ago.
— Nagaru Tanigawa, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
She understands now what she, in all her worry, had forgotten. That even as she hesitates and wavers, even as she thinks too much and moves too cautiously, she doesn't always have to get it right. It's okay to look back, even as you move forward.
— Jennifer E. Smith, The Comeback Season
Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.
— Timothy J. Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God
The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.
— Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment.
— T.S. Eliot
They keep track of time. Sometimes things happen and you feel that you need to mark them down.
— Scott O'Connor, Untouchable
Four days will quickly steep themselves in nightsFour nights will quickly dream away the time. 
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream
You see," he continued, beginning to feel better, "once there was no time at all, and people found it very inconvenient. They never knew wether they were eating lunch or dinner, and they were always missing trains. So time was invented to help them keep track of the day and get to places where they should. When they began to count all the time that was available, what with 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, it seemed as if there was much more than could ever be used. 'If there's so much of it, it couldn't be very valuable,' was the general opinion, and it soon fell into dispute. People wasted it and even gave it away. Then we were giving the job of seeing that no one wasted time again," he said, sitting up proudly. "It's hard work but a noble calling. For you see"- and now he was standing on the seat, one foot on the windshield, shouting with his ams outstretched- "it is our most valuable possession, more precious than diamonds. It marches on, it and tide wait for no man, and-" At that point in the speech the car hit a bump in the road and the watchdog collapsed in a heap on the front seat with his alarm ringing furiously.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
They say you can't stop time, that it is a constant and waits for no one. The're wrong. Time slows when you want it to speed up. It goes too Fast when you're having fun. And it stops. It stops dead in its tracks, when the unthinkable occurs. Time is not neutral, it makes no sence, and it bears no logic. It has nothing to do with nature or fairness or physics. Time is cruel. And its as simple as that.
— Heather Killough-Walden
To world enough and time.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.
— Alastair Bruce, Wall Of Days
The distance of a voice, is only a short time away from touch.
— Anthony Liccione
If I could, I would live forever in this moment. But no one can live in a moment, and time moves on.
— Elora Bishop, Braided: A Lesbian Rapunzel
Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that 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.
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.
— William Landay, Mission Flats
I was thinking not very long ago about the difference between the people we "grew up" with vs. the people we're "growing old" with - not always being one and the same - and how time (and the memories we forge together) really does strengthen pretty much all of our relationships/friendships (whether they had started on the right foot or not). And I guess what I've mostly learned (by moving to NZ especially) is that the more Significant people you have in your life, the more 'manageable' the idea of loss, losing a loved-one, can become - not because you can replace them (obviously you can't) or because they're interchangeable (no one is), but because like a foundation to a house the more pillars you have (people you love) holding it up (loving you) the more solid/resilient you become - and from there, I find you're better equipped to overcome whatever life throws your way. That said time does pass us by very quickly. I find it much more noticeable through our growing kids than ever before.
— Kim Dallmeier
I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.
— Dean Koontz, Chase
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
— Aleksandar Hemon, Love and Obstacles
... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...
— Joseph Brodsky, So Forth: Poems
The unreality of the past weeks lifted like a fog, but its residue remained. All of the past is like that, but most especially the parts that are out of the ordinary.
— Madeline Claire Franklin, The Poppet and the Lune
It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
They won't be a right be a right time, Thea, it doesn't exist. Just get it over with
— Catherine Greenman, Hooked
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
— John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
— Ernest Hemingway, American Lit for Idiots - a one act play
How can I stand before you in silent symbols with open palms?
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.
— John Fowles, Áristos
She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.
— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
O Space and Time and stars at strife,How dreadful your infinity!Shrined by your termless trinity,How strange, how terrible, is life!(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
The next visit I paid to Nancy Brown was in the second week in March: for, though I had many spare minutes during the day, I seldom could look upon an hour as entirely my own; since, when everything was left to the caprices of Miss Matilda and her sister, there could be no order or regularity. Whatever occupation I chose, when not actually busied about them or their concerns, I had, as it were, to keep my loins girded, my shoes on my feet, and my staff in my hand; for not to be immediately forthcoming when called for, was regarded as a grave and inexcusable offence: not only by my pupils and their mother, but by the very servant, who came in breathless haste to call me, exclaiming 'You're to go to the school-room directly, mum- the young ladies is WAITING!!' Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess!!!
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
One sin seldom mentioned is that of killing time.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The sand in the hourglass runs from one compartment to the other, marking the passage of moments with something constant and tangible.If you watch the flowing sand, you might see time itself riding the granules.Contrary to popular opinion, time is not an old white-haired man, but a laughing child.And time sings.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The full moon symbol on my calendar no longer seemed to be a period marking the end of something, but just another way of counting time.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead as a Doornail
She felt her future close upon her but unseen, like the sea behind the blowing veil of snow... She would follow Llyr's advice and face it a little every day...Day by day, step by step life would go forward. Eventually, the veil would lift, the cold would yield to the sun's warmth, and the world would be reborn. This dark time would pass.
— Nancy McKenzie, Guinevere's Gamble
Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life . . . the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.
— Samuel Johnson
Work on." Work as if every time you started with and every time you finish.
— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
And if you don't find what you're looking for?"At Roy's question Addie looked up."Then all I've lost is time.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.
— Jorge Luis Borges
It's the right idea, but not the right time.
— John  Dalton
The past embraces the futureThe future embraces the pastThey are both intertwinedLinked in all eternity
— Karen Hackel, The Whisper of Your Soul
Time = Life, Therefore, waste your time and waste of your life, or master your time and master your life.
— Alan Lakein
And why does he talk so funny? Doesn't he mean squashed tomatoes?I don't think that they had tomatoes when he comes from, said Bod. And that's just how they talk then.
— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
The friend of time doesn't spend all day saying: 'I haven't got time.' He doesn't fight with time. He accepts it and cherishes it.
— Jean Vanier, Community And Growth
When I do count the clock that tells the time,And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;When I behold the violet past prime,And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;When lofty trees I see barren of leavesWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd,And summer's green all girded up in sheavesBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard,Then of thy beauty do I question make,That thou among the wastes of time must go,Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsakeAnd die as fast as they see others grow;And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defenceSave breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Often, beyond the next turning, footfalls of a herd galloping across stone were heard, or further in the distance, with reassuring grunts, a wild boar could be seen, trotting with steady stride along the edge of the road with her sow and a whole procession of young in tow. And then one's heart beat faster upon advancing a little into the subtle light: one might have said that the path had suddenly become wild, thick with grass, its dark paving-slabs engulfed by nettles, blackthorn and sloe, so that it mingled up time past rather than crossing country-side, and perhaps it was going to issue forth, in the chiaroscuro of thicket smelling of moistened down and fresh grass, into one of those glades where animals spoke to men.
— Julien Gracq
It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly.
— Julien Gracq
In this marvelous dispensation of the fulness of times, our opportunities to give of ourselves are indeed limitless, but they are also perishable.
— Thomas S. Monson, Pathways To Perfection: Discourses Of Thomas S. Monson
Alice sighed wearily. `I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, `than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!'`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.'`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!
— Lewis Carroll
Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.
— Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living
For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Time is denial's mortal enemy and is always victorious against it.
— Chris Dietzel, The Hauntings of Playing God
I spur my horse past the ruined city;the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts:ancient battlements, high and low;old grave mounds, great and small.Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed tremblesand the voice of the great trees clings forever,I sigh over all these common bones --No roll of the immortals bears their names. 
— Han-shan
Punctuality is the thief of time.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Since words elude me when I need them most, I learned long ago that I cannot count on QUALITY time with God when I want to pray. I need QUANTITY and regularity. Quality is not something I can predict. My husband, Andy, and I might schedule an elaborate evening out with candles and a gourmet meal, but there is no guarantee that we'll have a wonderful time together -- chopping onions peppers die by side in the kitchen, reading together on the couch, sitting on the front step watching our sons ride bikes, and making plans for our life together. 
— Sybil MacBeth, Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God
why do we personify time? Is it because we’re afraid to admit that our lives are measured by an abstract force that neither knows nor cares about our entry into existence? Or our departure into death? Time is our mysterious master giving it a face and hands we attempt to transform it into our servant.
— Robert Bloch
struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature.
— Garth Stein
The future toyed with us, it was up to us to try to enjoy the game. But not everyone liked the game or they weren't given the tools to play.
— Carrie Adams, The Godmother
No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches.
— Julien Gracq
Time neither flies nor sleeps. It is flexible, plastic, ever changing. Spend two hours watching a movie curled up with your lover and time ceases to exist. Spend two hours waiting for your lover to come and time is the iron bars of a prison
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
What a slut time is. She screws everybody...
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Now we realize that time is our most valuable resource, and every minute we spend in one of these meetings just sitting there is time wasted.
— Blake Ross
It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.
— Randall Munroe
Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.
— Dejan Stojanovic
[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Never waste time for someone who doesn’t bother to spend time with you, but with someone who will say, time is wasted if I’m not with you.
— M. Ganesh Sai
Three things you cannot recover in life: the WORD after it’s said, the MOMENT after it’s missed and the TIME after it’s gone. Now you know.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things.""Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?""No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn