c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.
— Candace Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle
It's hard to believe. Where does the times go?' Betty sighs. 'I've always hated that phrase. It makes it would like time went on a holiday, and is expected back any day now. Time flies is another one I hate. Apparently, time does quite a bit of traveling, though.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence—neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish—it is an imponderably valuable gift.
— Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
It's not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.
— Seneca
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
— Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.
— Pierre-Simon Laplace
Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?
— Cecelia Ahern
Love is not loveWhich alters when alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:Oh, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
— William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems
…everyone needs a somewhere, a place he can go. There comes a time, you see, inevitably there comes a time you have to have a somewhere you can go!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.
— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
In this moment, there is plenty of time. In this moment, you are precisely as you should be. In this moment, there is infinite possibility. (17)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.
— Guy de Maupassant
No need to feel guilty if you can't be a good man all the time. But anytime your heart is feeling so eager to do even a small good deed, then it might be a good chance for you…to be a better man.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
— Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
When time is reduced to linear progress, it is emptied of presence.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Nobody works better under pressure. They just work faster.
— Brian Tracy
How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yoursWill make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.When once you hear the roses are in bloom,Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.
— Omar Khayyám
The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows
— André Breton
I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.
— Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.
— Martina Boone
I care not that this moment’s lot was thin and sparsely dealt all pleasures sweet can be forgot the instant they are felt. 
— Roman Payne
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?
— Ian McEwan, The Child in Time
…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time?Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while.Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
— Albert Camus
Time plays tricks between here and home," said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator.
— Garth Nix, Abhorsen
It is too late." The old man shook his head. "It is never too late or too soon. It is when it is supposed to be." He smiled. "There is a plan, Dor.
— Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
Money is not the only commodity that is fun to give. We can give time, we can give our expertise, we can give our love or simply give a smile. What does that cost? The point is, none of us can ever run out of something worthwhile to give.
— Steve Goodier
For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
— Doug Larsen
My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.
— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.
— José Saramago, Blindness
Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.
— Franz Winkler
There is a time for work, and a time for love. That leaves no other time.
— Coco Chanel
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:  Essays and Arguments
You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye—and he was willing to bet, when it happened, you weren’t thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart. You thought of all the reasons that kept you together. And, no doubt, how you wished you’d had more time. Even if you’d had centuries… When you were young, you thought time was a burden, something to be discharged as fast as possible so you could be grown-up. But it was such a bait-n-switch—when you were an adult, you came to realize that minutes and hours were the single most precious thing you had. No one got forever. And it was a fucking crime to waste what you were given.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Reborn
I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.
— Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
Understanding is not absolutely final.What's now right could be wrong later.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Time is the enemy of identity
— Michael Moorcock
Don't live the same year 75 times and call it a life.
— Robin S. Sharma
Time. There is much time left and lots of life seasons. There is much to see, to do, and to be.
— Adam Young
Time talks behind our back. To our face it's friendly and logical, never hesitating to give more of itself. But when we're not looking, it steals our lives and says bad things about us to the parts of us it's stolen
— Jonathan Carroll, A Child Across the Sky
For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. These events, so distant in legend, play a part in shaping the very events we witness about us, each and every day.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
Travellers understand, instinctively and by experience, that travel and adventure change and elongate time, even while navigating the deadlines of airline and train departures.
— Paul Sheehan
The most precious thing I have to give is my time.
— Silvia Hartmann
Procrastination is also a subtle act of corruption – it corrupts valuable time
— Amit Abraham
Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life.
— Michael LeBoeuf
Who do you spend time with? Criticizers or encouragers? Surround yourself with those who believe in you. Your life is too important for anything less.
— Steve Goodier
There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.
— Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness
Time did not compose her.
— Jane Austen, Emma
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.
— A.W. Tozer
There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.
— Martha Graham
It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 stitches. Never mind that you need two of them. (That's 34,000 stitches, for anybody keeping track.) Socks are only physically small. By stitch count, they are immense.
— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much
there's time for laughing and there's time for crying— for hoping for despair for peace for longing —a time for growing and a time for dying: a night for silence and a day for singingbut more than all(as all your more than eyes tell me)there is a time for timelessness
— E.E. Cummings
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
— Diane Ackerman
I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.
— Karl Lagerfeld
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. In this way transience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.
— Roman Payne, Hope and Despair
Nick... I hope one day you find you a woman who loves you like my Melissa loved me. Whatever you do, boy, don't turn your back on her. If she says she needs you for something, don't matter how stupid it sounds or what deadline you got, you go to her and you do it. Screw work or whatever else. In the end, the only things that matter are the people in your life. The ones who make your life worth living and whose smiles light up your world. Don't ever push them aside for fair-weather friends. Everything else is just cheap window dressing that you can replace. But once them people are gone..." He winced. "You can't buy back time, Nick. Ever. It's the only thing in life you can't get more of, and it's the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it's gone. It takes pity on no soul and no heart. And all those fools who tell you it gets easier in time are lying dumb-asses. Losing someone you really love don't never get easier. You just go a few hours longer without breaking down. That's all... that's all. - Bubba
— Sherrilyn Kenyon
So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.
— Charles Frazier
...people change, even good people, if they get the wrong thing in their head. And not everything is always what it looks like and sometimes just because one person looks weak, they might be very strong, and another person might look like a spooky freak but he might be one of the kindest people you'd ever meet. And I guess I learned that time is slippery...We have to enjoy every second, love with all our hearts, all we can, while we can.
— Lee Thompson
Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late.
— Marie Beynon Ray
But that’s the trouble with moments—they end." ~Narrator
— S.M. Boyce, Lichgates
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. The longer I live, the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.
— John Burroughs
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
— C.S. Lewis
This world is out of date
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
When the rare chance comes, seize itTo do the rare deed.
— Thiruvalluvar, Kural
We’re gonna make up for that. We’re gonna live a long time together.
— Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
It's strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden
The concept of time, as it’s commonly understood by normalpeople with normal jobs and normal goddamn lives, doesn’texist on the road. The nights spread out like the dark,godforsaken highways that distinguish them, and the days runtogether like Thanksgiving dinner smothered in gravy. Younever really know where you are or what time it is, and the outsideworld starts to fade away.It’s cool.
— Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star
Everyday is one less day.
— Tom Ford
Today is an ephemeral ghost...A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not "exist."In mundane terms, it marks a "leap" in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up!But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability...A day of unlocked potential.Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.
— Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal 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 on the timepiece of the mind by one second.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.
— Vanna Bonta, Shades Of The World
Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?
— Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web
Six a.m.!" Xander cried. "I know that's a number on my clock, but I've never actually been awake to personally witness it!
— Alice Henderson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vol. 1
Time, as it grows old, teaches all things.
— Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
I do not know what she was thinking, but I was remembering the years we have lived together, yet never together, and what a waste they have been--of each other, and of love, which is the most unpardonable waste there is. Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.
— Gary Jennings
Time. I would have gone somewhere to buy time.
— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time
It's funny, I don't feel any older than I did when I was twenty. But I know I am, because recently some twenty-year-old called me 'sir.' Sometimes the only way you know you are getting older is by the way others treat you.
— John Van Epp, How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk: The Foolproof Way to Follow Your Heart Without Losing Your Mind
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.
— T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, Prufrock and Other Poems
She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.
— George Kubler
When days seem like years and years feel like days.
— Robert Brown Fulford
Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable.
— Hubert Selby Jr., The Room
The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.
— Mark Doty
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.
— Larry Niven
Time doesn't heal all wounds, only distance can lessen the sting of them.
— Shannon L. Alder
Time, Ms. McHenry," Townsend said. "It can be a cruel, cruel thing
— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time
The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
— Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless
— Robert Aickman
Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
You can’t buy time, Nick. Ever. It’s the only thing in life you can’t get most of, and it’s the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it’s gone. It takes no pity on no soul and no heart.
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Invincible
We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.
— Arthur Machen, The Terror
The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn't really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.
— Clive Barker, The Thief of Always
Day is just a collection of hours.
— Serj Tankian
...the only difference between a young person at the height of their exuberance and a very old person who is frail and physically wasted is time.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.
— Anne Rice, Pandora
Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way otherthan just getting older.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
We have to forego some good things in order to choose others that are better or best because they develop faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and strengthen our families.
— Dallin H. Oaks
So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Time heals even the deepest wounds.
— Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them. 
— C.S. Lewis
I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different
— Graham Greene
Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
A while ago?” Anaxantis asked. “Yes, he raped me a while ago. Exactly nine months and two days ago. What's that? Nine months or nine minutes. It's the same. And it is in the past, you say? Then why is it still happening, every day, every time I close my eyes? Every time I hear someone behind me, and I don't know who it is? How is it that I get an almost irresistible urge to kill anyone who happens to touch me unexpectedly? Tell me, Hemarchidas, how do I forgive, let alone forget, something that is still happening, that keeps happening over and over? How? How do I do that?
— Andrew Ashling, The Invisible Chains - Part 1: Bonds of Hate
Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
... the river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.
— Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish
Nothing makes time pass or shortens the way like a thought that absorbs in itself all the faculties of the one who is thinking. External existence is then like a sleep of which this thought is the dream. Under its influence, time has no more measure, space has no more distance.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
There is so little time. We need to make every moment count.
— Shannon Delany, Secrets and Shadows
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions
They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
If the whole world I once could seeOn free soil stand, with the people freeThen to the moment might I say,Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part
Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
— Hippocrates
As a breath on glass, -As witch-fires that burn,The gods and monsters pass,Are dust, and return.(“The Face of the Skies”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods. "Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry.""Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way." "A week?""That means seven days.""Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?""Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before. He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world.
— Scott Westerfeld, Pretties
They say time will make all this go away. But it's time that's taken my tomorrow, and turned them into yesterday.
— Ben Harper
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use
—  back then it was a 'broken home'...
Time is like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. You can never go back.
— Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Keeper: A Novel
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.
— Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.” “I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense.
— Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
Our days are numbered. One of the primary goals in our lives should be to prepare for our last day. The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the quality of our lives. What preparations should we be making now? The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day.
— Bill Graham
The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
I got tired of feeling like Dracula. I wanted to see some daylight, and not just at six o’clock in the morning.
— Kate Moss
A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time. 
— Francis Bacon
Things take the time they take.Don't worry.How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
— Mary Oliver
Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.
— Sam Tanenhaus, Literature Unbound
God schedules a birthday, not man.
— Robert A. Bradley, Husband-Coached Childbirth: The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Every second counts
— Dorothy Koomson, My Best Friend's Girl
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ...
— Louis Hector Berlioz
Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.
— Harlan Ellison
Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.
— Margaret George, Elizabeth I
Smartass Disciple: Which one was first created, time or things?Master of Stupidity: No things, no changes. No changes, no time.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The future is a split second away.
— Ana Monnar
You can't make footprints in the sand of time if you're sitting on your butt, and who wants to make buttprints in the sand of time?
— Bob Moawad
If you have sixty seconds worth of distance...run!
— Chris Stevenson
Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.
— Han Kang, Human Acts
In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.
— Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
It makes me wonder, Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or forget things? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives? I don't know.
— Markus Zusak, Fighting Ruben Wolfe
There is nowhere morning does not go.
— Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things
In the darkness of night,Demons strut, taunting, goading.In the light of day,Angels sing glorious songs.In the time in between,We live our lives alone and searching.And sometimes, softly,You understand damnation.All is forgotten, all is lost,All but forgivenessAnd the memory of her kiss.
— Lisa Mangum, The Hourglass Door
Everything started as nothing.
— Auliq Ice
A true friend is one you can go extended periods without seeing or talking to, yet the moment that you are back in touch, it's like no time has passed at all.
— Ellie Wade, A Forever Kind of Love
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
a life can change in a tenth ofa second.or sometimes it can take70years.
— Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories
The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.
— Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer
You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.
— Denis Diderot
Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.
— Douglas Coupland
It's so egotistical to believe that we know more about someone else's reality than they do, and such a waste of time.
— Shreve Stockton, The Daily Coyote: Story of Love, Survival, and Trust In the Wilds of Wyoming
If today you don't have time for those who gave all their time for you yesterday then tomorrow they will not have time to give to you who has no time today
— Amit Abraham
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.
— Chris Wooding, Poison
If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." ~ Margaret Thatcher
— Margaret Thatcher
Time is a structured perception towards observable changes.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Creativity is the residue of time wasted.
— Albert Einstein
The work of memory collapses time.
— Walter Benjamin
Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
— James Thurber, The 13 Clocks