c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Months are different in college, especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they're like dog months.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
The future starts today, not tomorrow.
— John Paul II
Punctuality is the thief of time
— Oscar Wilde
This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.
— Martin Luther
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
— Alan W. Watts
the tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.
— Charles Bukowski
The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Time is the most valuable thing that a man can spend.
— Diogenes Laërtius
A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
— Fidel Castro
The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can't save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly.
— Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh
Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
— William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor
Time is more precious than gold, more precious than diamonds, more precious than oil or any valuable treasures. It is time that we do not have enough of; it is time that causes the war within our hearts, and so we must spend it wisely.
— Cecelia Ahern, The Gift
Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.
— William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.
— Tennessee Williams
Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life. 
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Birds
Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.
— R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver
Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Time is Galleons, little brother.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
— Anna Quindlen, Loud and Clear
I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.
— Johnny Depp
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.
— Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
— Moses Hadas
Time heals all wounds. But not this one. Not yet.
— Marie Lu, Champion
You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.
— Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
The years teach much the days never know.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
You forget, time doesn't exist anymore. You gave it to me.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
— Stephen Hunt, The Court of the Air
Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.
— Helen Humphreys, Coventry
The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
There are two days in my calendar: This day and that Day.
— Martin Luther
Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.
— Graham Greene
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
— John Milton
We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass. And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table, and I think how in that moment I have aged, and passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny.We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but - I say to myself-I am not she who left him five minutes ago. She has stayed behind. I am another woman, older, more mature…
— Daphne du Maurier
The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
As she’d left, I’d glanced at her gun.This time, when she’d pointed it at me, she’d flicked the safety on. If that wasn’t true love, I don’t know what was.
— Brandon Sanderson, Firefight
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?""Well […] I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.""And when you have waited—-has it made you sure?
— James     Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
— William Carlos Williams
Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.
— Michael Ende, Momo
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
Time has no dominion over love. Love is the one thing that transcends time. (Bones)
— Jeaniene Frost, One Foot in the Grave
I wake up and I see the face of the devil and I ask him, "What time is it?"And he says, How much time do you want?
— Diamanda Galás, The Shit of God
Love goes through all times
— Kerstin Gier
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
— Carl Sandburg
Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.
— Robert Greene, Mastery
It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.
— Samuel Beckett
It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.
— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Sometimes life is a constant battle against the nostalgia of a time that can never be real again.
— Jason Myers, The Mission
TimeYou were the oneI wanted mostto stay.But time could notbe kept at bay.The more it goes,the more it's gone—the more it takes away.
— Lang Leav, Lullabies
I am not particularly interested insaving time I prefer to enjoy it. 
— Eduardo Galeano
We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi
Time was such an odd thing. One moment you could talk to someone, then suddenly, they were gone.
— Patricia Briggs, Raven's Strike
Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
— John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
He shrugs. "Doesn't help to waste my time thinking about would've-beens."Laila whispers, "He says to the girl with a mind full of them.
— Kasie West, Pivot Point
-'What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter
— P.G. Wodehouse
If time be judiciously employed, there is time for everything.
— George Head, A Home Tour Through the Manufacturing Districts of England in the Summer of 1835
But nothing warps time quite like childhood
— Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 3
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.
— John Green, Paper Towns
By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.
— Horace Mann
I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.
— Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
— Eugene O'Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten
how does she know it's the right room?' wondered Descant.Oh, I don't know; mabye it's the magical red glow coming from the doorway, or perhaps it's the deafening howl of the temporal winds.' said Mervall. Descant nodded.'You could be right, brother. And don't think I don't know sarcasm when I hear it.
— Eoin Colfer, The Time Paradox
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.
— Madeleine L'Engle
In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
There was a beautiful time...
— Sylvia Plath
You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.
— Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
— Milan Kundera, Slowness
From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.
— Roman Payne
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
— J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
If you act like you've only got fifteen minutes, it will take all day. Act like you've got all day, it will take fifteen minutes.
— Monty Roberts
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...
— Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street
If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.
— Hayao Miyazaki
This thing all things devours:Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;Gnaws iron, bites steel;Grinds hard stones to meal;Slays king, ruins town,And beats high mountain down.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
You can find something truly important in an ordinary minute.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Want to have a short phone call with someone? Call them at 11:55 a.m., right before lunch. They'll talk fast. You may think you are interesting, but you are not more interesting than lunch.
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.
— Tim Winton, Breath
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read
— Warren Zevon
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
— Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
We no longer have the luxury of spending our energy on anything that does not lead us and our families to Christ.
— Sheri Dew
Time has a wonderful way to show us what really matters.
— Margaret Peters
We shall never meet, but there is something I want you to know. My time is not the same as your time. Our times are not the same. And do you know what that means? That means that time does not exist. Do you want me to repeat that? There is no time. There is a life and a death. There are people and animals. Our thoughts exist. And the world. The universe, too. But there is no time. You might as well take it easy. Do you feel better now? I feel better. This is going to work out. Have a nice day.
— Erlend Loe, Naïve. Super
I hadn’t been a nerd, mind you. I’d just been the type of guy who spent a lot of time by himself, focused entirely on a single consuming interest.
— Brandon Sanderson, Firefight
I don't have time, energy, or interest in hating the haters; I'm too busy loving the lovers.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
For after the Battle comes quiet.
— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Never waste any time you can spend sleeping.
— Frank H. Knight
Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time.""Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.
— Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
If we accept time for what it is, how it flows and how we flow with it, I doubt very much that would continue wasting loads of it by constantly checking our watches.
— Samantha Sotto, Before Ever After
What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.
— Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
We are all migrants through time.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
If you keep waiting for the right time, it may never happen. Sometimes you have to make the most of the time you have.
— Priya Ardis, Ever My Merlin
It was a lesson that I would learn in time though it wasn't Hegbert who taught me.
— Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember
Nothing endures but change.
— Heraclitus
It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.
— Markus Zusak, Fighting Ruben Wolfe
It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.
— Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
Santa Claus has nothing to do with it," the latke said. "Christmas and Hanukah are completely different things.""But different things can often blend together," said the pine tree. "Let me tell you a funny story about pagan rituals.
— Lemony Snicket, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story
There was only present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn't drive us mad.
— Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the good fight.
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
To them, as to Magnus, time was like rain, glittering as it fell, changing the world, but something that could also be taken for granted.Until you loved a mortal. Then time became gold in a miser's hands, every bright year counted out carefully, infinitely precious, and each one slipping through your fingers.
— Cassandra Clare, The Bane Chronicles
They have gone. And the tunnel is about to close. So, boys, I am looking for someone to blame.
— Eoin Colfer, The Time Paradox
But I have learned that you can't just create your own timetable and will it to come true.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
Every moment is the paradox of now or never.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.
— Jack London, The Call of the Wild
And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.
— Meg Rosoff, What I Was
Oh, shimmer down, Hunter. You're too testy. How many times have I've told you that you need to chill out, take a vacay. Disney World is really fun this time of the year. you should check it out.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Obsession
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Things worth telling - take time
— Nicholas Denmon
A person that does not value your time will not value your advice.
— Orrin Woodward
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.
— Alexander Graham Bell
But now we have time. Endless time stretches before us.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
There is always time for another last minute
— Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
It hadn't been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she'd been an altogether different person back then.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, times, and hours.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
Time heals all wounds.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its stud
— Hector Berlioz
I wish I’d paid better attention. I didn’t yet think of time as finite. I didn’t fully appreciate the stories she told me until I became adult, and by then I had to make do with snippets pasted together, a film projected on the back of my mind.
— Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow
Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
We must use time creatively - and forever realize that the time is always hope to do great things.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he’d always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds.
— Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up
The part of life we really live is small.' For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
— Seneca
Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
— Thornton Wilder, Our Town
The secret is,” I say, whispering right into his ear, “that yours was the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life.”“But I’ve never kissed you,” he whispers back. Around us the rain sounds like falling glass. “Not since third grade, anyway.” I smile, but I’m not sure if he can see it.“Better get started, then,” I say, “because I don’t have much time.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
Only bad things happen quickly, . . . Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues. 
— Gordon Livingston
You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
— Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.
— Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis
To them, as to Magnus, time was like rain, glittering as it fell, changing the world, but something that could also be taken for granted.
— Cassandra Clare, The Bane Chronicles
There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.
— Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
— Henry James
Time crumbles things everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time. 
— Aristotle
About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.
— Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
— W.B. Yeats
Time is not your friend. It doesn't care if you live fast or die slow, if you are or if you aren't. It was here before you arrived and it will go on after you leave. Time doesn't care who wins or who loses, if your life span is full or empty, honorable or shameful. Time is indifferent. It simply doesn't give a shit.
— Laura Wiess, Leftovers
The Clock on the Morning Lenape BuildingMust Clocks be circles?Time is not a circle.Suppose the Mother of All Minutes startedright here, on the sidewalkin front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the paradeof minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--headed out that way, down Bridge Street.Where would Now be? This minute?Out past the moon?Jupiter?The nearest star?Who came up with minutes, anyway?Who needs them?Name one good thing a minute's ever done.They shorten fun and measure misery.Get rid of them, I say.Down with minutes!And while you're at it--take hourswith you too. Don't get me startedon them.Clocks--that's the problem.Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.Clocks strap us into their shape.Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we dois corkscrew.Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and roundfrom number to number,dice the time of our lives into tiny bitsuntil the bits are all we knowand the only question we care to ask is"What time is it?"As if minutes could tell.As if Arnold could look up at this clock onthe Lenape Building and read:15 Minutes till Found.As if Charlie's time is not forever stuckon Half Past Grace.As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou to step outside.As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyersneed to know.
— Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one is smaller.
— Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul
I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
— Nick Hornby, Slam
Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance
— Leo Buscaglia
For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it.
— Karl Lagerfeld
Just 'cause there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire inside.
— Bonnie Hunt
And it's a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.
— Karl Ove Knausgård, A Time for Everything
Time and tide wait for no man.
— Stephen King
I don't need time, I need a deadline.
— Duke Ellington
Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.
— Yahtzee Croshaw
Even a moment's reflection will help you see that the problem of using your time well is not a problem of the mind but of the heart. It will only yield to a change in the very way we feel about time. The value of time must change for us. And then the way we think about it will change, naturally and wisely. That change in feeling and in thinking is combined in the words of a prophet of God in this dispensation. It was Brigham Young, and the year was 1877, and he was speaking at April general conference. He wasn't talking about time or schedules or frustrations with too many demands upon us. Rather, he was trying to teach the members of the Church how to unite themselves in what was called the united order. The Saints were grappling with the question of how property should be distributed if they were to live the celestial law. In his usual direct style, he taught the people that they were having trouble finding solutions because they misunderstood the problem. Particularly, he told them they didn't understand either property or the distribution of wealth. Here is what he said: With regard to our property, as I have told you many times, the property which we inherit from our Heavenly Father is our time, and the power to choose in the disposition of the same. This is the real capital that is bequeathed unto us by our Heavenly Father; all the rest is what he may be pleased to add unto us. To direct, to counsel and to advise in the disposition of our time, pertains to our calling as God's servants, according to the wisdom which he has given and will continue to give unto us as we seek it. [JD 18:354] Time is the property we inherit from God, along with the power to choose what we will do with it. President Young calls the gift of life, which is time and the power to dispose of it, so great an inheritance that we should feel it is our capital. The early Yankee families in America taught their children and grandchildren some rules about an inheritance. They were always to invest the capital they inherited and live only on part of the earnings. One rule was "Never spend your capital." And those families had confidence the rule would be followed because of an attitude of responsibility toward those who would follow in later generations. It didn't always work, but the hope was that inherited wealth would be felt a trust so important that no descendent would put pleasure ahead of obligation to those who would follow. Now, I can see and hear Brigham Young, who was as flinty a New Englander as the Adams or the Cabots ever hoped to be, as if he were leaning over this pulpit tonight. He would say something like this, with a directness and power I wish I could approach: "Your inheritance is time. It is capital far more precious than any lands or stocks or houses you will ever get. Spend it foolishly, and you will bankrupt yourself and cheapen the inheritance of those that follow you. Invest it wisely, and you will bless generations to come.	“A Child of Promise”, BYU Speeches, 4 May 1986
— Henry B. Eyring
He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
Magnus deeply disliked people who were early to business meetings. It was just as bad as being late, since it put everyone out, and even worse, people who were early always acted terribly superior about their bad timekeeping skills. They acted as though it were morally more righteous to get up early than to stay up late, even if you got the same amount of work done in the exact same amount of time. Magnus found it to be one of the great injustices of life.
— Cassandra Clare, What to Buy the Shadowhunter Who Has Everything
Put up in a placewhere it is easy to seethe cryptic admonishmentT.T.TWhen you feel how depressinglyslowly you climbit's well to remember thatThings Take Time.
— Piet Hein
Time was a funny and fickle thing. Sometimes there was never enough of it, and other times it stretched out endlessly.
— J. Lynn, Be with Me
You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
— Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
Time felt slower when we do nothing but wait.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.
— Karl Lagerfeld
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.
— Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Do you want to be with Dave for the rest of your life?” Then he rips off a piece of paper and picks upthe smallest charcoal stick from my set. He writes something. He passes it over to me.It says:Time will tell.“And while you’re waiting,” he says, “don’t settle for anything less than what you really want.
— Susane Colasanti, When It Happens
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic.
— Dan Rather
Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them."Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at all. "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren't for that dreadful magic staff, you'd never know how much time you were wasting.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Time was like that, though - racing forward when she wanted it to slow down, then crawling to a stop when she could least bear it.
— Aprilynne Pike, Illusions
University's like this little world, a bubble of time separate from everything before and everything after.
— Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello
Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
— Lenny Bruce, The Essential Lenny Bruce: his original unexpurgated satirical routines
Time is a waste of money.
— Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.
— Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile