c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Back then we gave it our all, we neither lied nor made mistakes, we didn't fail and didn't do anything wrong.It's just that...TIME has passed and changed it all.
— Yuuki Obata, We Were There, Vol. 1
Without space, there is no time.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The world is on fire time is a bomb.Ten thousand years are not enoughWhen so much remains to be done 
— Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist
— Salman Rushdie
There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning.
— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley and Later Novels, 1947-1962
What was the constant?Movement. Yes. With time there was always movement. The setting sun. The dripping water. Thependulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flowof time completely …
— Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
...the passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole. -pg. 19
— Félix J. Palma
Time is like a barber, it shears you first and then shows you your own face in the mirror. (Marrying Nusrat)
— Manjul Bajaj, Another Man's Wife and Other Stories
Money should not dictate how I live my life..I must take charge and become the master of money, so that I decide what I want to do with my time.
— Manoj Arora
I used to think I had all the time in the world to do everything I wanted. But what's the use of having all the time in the world if you're always wasting it on things that don't mean a thing?
— Mike Gayle, Dinner for Two
The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory ...
— José Saramago, The Cave
It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal line which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not int he intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.
— Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2
No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.
— Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother
The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child's words and child's deeds didn't make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn't observed, even pressed his cheek against it.
— Karl Ove Knausgård, A Time for Everything
By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
You put your time where your priority is.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
Our names were made for us in another century.
— Richard Brautigan
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
— Susan Sontag
The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist
The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...
— Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium
My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born
— John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning
I am talking to you, but the moment I am talking to you, the universe is being created and destroyed.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Time itself made all things rare.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
You are not meant to serve time. Time is meant to serve you. Become the master of your now
— E'yen A. Gardner
Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54]
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Time. For some it was a great healer, the ultimate fixer of bad break-ups, shake-ups, and heartache… For others, Time was an insidious stealer of all things they want most in life, stripping it away from them by sneakily changing the rules of obtaining it… For all the joyful wishes and hopeful desires held near and dear to our hearts, Time was the one element most likely to keep it from our reach.To me, Time was all of these, and none. Time simply is. It’s the framework in which we play out the games of our lives, but the secret is not to control it. It is not to master it. It is simply to learn to exist fully within the moment, to be aware of every facet of our being, and to wring every ounce of joy from it. Perhaps we were our own thieves, lamenting the absence of even a spare moment to enjoy life, when all it really takes is to stop the complaints, take the moment firmly in hand, and make it our own. Because the secret is that Time passes, and if you let it, it will leave you in its wake, aching with every beat of your heart and in every fiber of your being for what you have missed.
— Madelyn Alt, A Witch in Time
I always wanted to know what it is right. Maybe we know each other from time immemorial, if you know that in you is the eternal energy of goodness, which is most important for you.
— Gregor Golob
The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
— Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
— R.D. Laing
Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all.
— Sophocles
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
— Emil M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms
... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
The only currency that we really have to spend during our lives is time. Everything else is just a sub-category.
— Stephen R. Bown
Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
The great opposition to reading is what I allow to fill my time instead of reading. To say we have no time to read is not really true; we simply have chosen to use our time for other things, or have allowed our time to be filled to the exclusion of reading. So don't add reading to your to-do list. Just stop doing the things that keep you from doing it. But read.
— James Emery White
Esoteric things progress not according to time, but by activity, they can be slow or quick, depending upon the efforts made.
— Belsebuub
You must not think of time as a quantity, a period, a measure. Look at the sky," Gwynneth said. "The moon has now slipped away to another night, into another world. It was not the time it was here that you remember, Faolan, but rather the luminescence of the air, the blue shadows cast by the trees in its light. It was not the length of the time but the quality of the moon's light that you felt and remember." Gwynneth paused. "It is the value, the quality that lives on.
— Kathryn Lasky, Lone Wolf
Gradually it became known that the new race had a definite purpose, and that purpose was to chart and possess the whole country, regardless of the rights of its earlier inhabitants. Still the old chiefs cautioned their people to be patient, for, said they, the land is vast, both races can live on it, each in their own way. Let us therefore befriend them and trust their friendship. While they reasoned thus, the temptations of graft and self-aggrandizement overtook some of the leaders.
— Charles Alexander Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains
Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
It is still this moment and that will be true of every moment that follows, assuming this moment ever ends, which, if I am lucky, it won't.
— Justin Taylor
[T]he people who are close to Allah worry so much about wasting time that they call themselves to account for every breath they spend - how many of us wonder about how we spend our day, let alone each breath?
— Ethar El-Katatney, Forty Days and Forty Nights - in Yemen: A Journey to Tarim, the City of Light
What is far is very close, and what is close is very far
— Fola, The Seed
I get up at seven yeah and I go to work at nine. I got no time for livin'. Yes I'm workin' all the time. It seems to me I could live my life a lot better than I think I am. I guess that's why they call me they call me the workin' man.
— Rush
you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.
— Robert Penn Warren
You chose to live here now. You should try to live in the present.
— Francesca Marciano, Casa Rossa
It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
I'm sure, the highest capacity of storage device, will not enough to record all our stories; because, everytime with you is very valuable data
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
As for time, all men have it in abundance.
— George S. Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon
You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.
— Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
Most of our lives are crucified between two thieves, yesterday and tomorrow. We never live today. But the time to live is now. It is today.
— W. Oscar Thompson, Concentric Circles of Concern: From Self to Others Through Life-Style Evangelism
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
— Walter Benjamin
For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.
— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible.	And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia")
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]
— Peter O'Donnell
Time is funny lately, nothing to do with clocks.
— Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch
Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.
— Patricia Hampl
The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father's dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(“The Testimony of the Suns”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory—a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.
— Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty face from day to day.
— William Shakespeare
A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.("Ephemera")
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
Who knows the life which does not burn its own time moments?
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
Time was spinning numerous threads for its tapestry, some to be woven together, some to entangle or fray, others merely to perish and pass away.
— Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Weatherwitch
Eternity is the stopped heart of Time.
— Sorin Cerin
Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
You see, Valentin, there is no such thing as time. It's just a road, a path to travel on. Most of the world is on a train, traveling forward all the time, speeding toward death, with a set schedule and someone else in charge.
— Daniel Nayeri
Time is, in fact, a cross to bear, it passes on inexorably and remorselessly, destroying everything in its wake, save art and works of the intellect.
— Jack Schmitt
Smartass Disciple: Where were all things before the time began?Master of Stupidity: What was the time before all things created?
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days.
— Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place
Time passes so fast. Make time to be still.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they really needed was Mother Nature and time.
— Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
It's been 12 years now, and I think he still can read my smiles. The way my lips stretch, making my eyes look smaller than they already are. The way my cheeks turn a little red, forming new wrinkles near my eyes. The way the dimple on my face makes a visit whenever I smile meeting someone I haven't seen in ages. It's been 12 years now, and I haven't smiled at him even once.
— Sanhita Baruah
There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.
— Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Time is but an illusion created by beings with limited perception.
— Ken Poirot
His body and his soul appeared to have the strange ability to repel the hours, just as, inversely, a magnet attracts metal. Everything spun about him and fled; he was always the sole centre of an enormous circumference. He kept moving forwards, body and soul, in the hope of coming close to what fled at his approach. The same thing happened with time – his position remained constant in relation to the thing which, however hard he tried to clasp it to him, stole away from him and bounded into the distance. He was the one who had no incriminating papers in his drawers, who could show his diary to anyone. He was a creator. Perhaps that was why his life did not exist
— Mário de Sá-Carneiro
Love is circumstantial we can love anyone if need be and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past. 
— Andrew Solomon
The passing time is painful. I have lost the art of moving simply, naturally, within it. I am swept back against its flow. Angry, vindictive, it pierces me all the time, all the time with its spikes.
— David Grossman, Falling Out of Time
[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods
— Ralph Linton
Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness
I don't think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time—
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…
— Vladimir Odoyevsky
This is going to take forever.""I wouldn't mind spending forever with you," Zaid winked.
— Aishabella Sheikh, Converting The Bad Boy
How much time? Not as much as I had yesterday.
— Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Giant
In the end, Nora, there’s only time. All we have is time…and even if this wasn’t happening, we still don’t ever have much…no one does. We only have the moment we’re in. We have right now.
— Dennis Sharpe, Saturday Night To Infinity
Time is the empty space that allows knowledge—let alone wisdom—to grow.
— John Hunter, World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements
Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.
— Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories
There would be a time, when you will ask for nothing but life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words.  THE END
— Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Time passes: yesterday has gone for ever but tomorrow never comes. Let's make the most of today.
— Robert Ashby
I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks over various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.
— John Green, Paper Towns
And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again.
— Francine Prose, Goldengrove
I miss being the age when I thought I'd have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now..
— k.j. force
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.
— William Faulkner, Light in August
A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
— Yiyun Li
We spend too much time keeping up with celebrities. They're living their dreams, what about you? Are you where you want to be in life. Get off the couch, turn off the tv and start achieving your goals.
— Bianca Frazier
Time...a maniac scattering dust.
— Alfred Tennyson
Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?
— Hermann Hesse
we may say that History develops, Art stands still
— E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.[Having himself spent a lifetime unsuccessfully trying to prove Euclid's postulate that parallel lines do not meet, Farkas discouraged his son János from any further attempt.]
— Farkas Bolyai
Time doesn’t change anything that is why we still worship asshole Arabs. 
— M.F. Moonzajer
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
— Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Time is just going on and on .But I still here Idle just Waiting for someone and nothing else
— Amardeep Singh
And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.
— Rémy de Gourmont, Philosophic Nights in Paris,: Being Selections from Promenades Philosophiques
Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.
— Roger Zelazny, Power & Light
He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Time is the mercy of Eternity without Time's swiftness/ Which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment. 
— William Blake, Milton a Poem
There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Time will tell, I suppose, or at least, these pages will.
— Markus Zusak, Fighting Ruben Wolfe
Life could be horrible in the wrong trouser of time.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.
— Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines
Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal.
— Tahir Shah, Beyond The Devil's Teeth
Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.
— Ramona Ausubel, No One is Here Except All of Us
An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.
— Bonnie Friedman
It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator
He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. --Solar
— Ian McEwan, Solar
SimpleComplex systems can arisefrom simple rules.It
— Rae Armantrout, Versed
No time to see, in broad daylight,Streams full of stars, like skies at night.No time to turn at Beauty's glance,And watch her feet, how they can dance.No time to wait till her mouth canEnrich that smile her eyes began.
— W.H. Davies
Light — i.e. space — is the structure of time, the essence of existence. The stuff of physics does not involve time. Orthodox contemporary physics sadly refers to this fact as “the problem of time.
— Eric Bredesen, Mythology & History
The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.
— William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels
For our last shall be the recorder of eternity.
— Cory Hair
Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.
— Carl Sandburg
Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?
— H. Rider Haggard, She
Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer. 
— Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories
Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...
— Clive Barker, Absolute Midnight
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.
— Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing
The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.
— Stephen Baxter, Exultant
We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong.God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We should trust Him. It was not that long ago that Jesus came and it will not be that long before He returns.
— Douglas Wilson
Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.
— Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
With time comes perspective.
— Joshua Wisenbaker
What is timea November leaf a child's vacillating mouth a rose a left-over, half-drunk glass of water.
— İlhan Berk
We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
He was thinking what a long and wide thing time is, to have so many happenings in it.
— Russell Hoban, Soonchild
I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ... "You grew up, Alex.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Time is precious, so use it wisely in every area of your life including having a relationship with God through"The Door", Jesus Christ! No one knows how much time that they have to live, so don't allow time to run out on you!
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
Sir Henry fixed him with a keen eye.'Odd name, Tom Skatt - eh?''Thats right''You don't think we could be related?'Tom looked up at his great-great-great-uncle and smiled.'I don't think so''No,' grinned Sir Henry "no, of course not
— Henry Chancellor, The Museum's Secret
Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.
— P.D. James, The Private Patient
The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
— Tahir Shah, House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
Ends Meet1Could betime is practice,balance,the actionexecuted in the mindbefore and after.Where does mind end?2We mark a breakwith what has come before,come through the door,down the 
— Rae Armantrout, Money Shot
It turns out there is only one possible thing to do in this circumstance, to wait the only way there is to wait through eternity, and that is through creativity.
— Last Man Standing, WHEN YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE RIGHT, THERE'S NOTHING TO WRITE ABOUT
Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
In the first of our conversations, you explained how different time was for you—how it’s an abstraction. Some hours glide past like birds, others are slow, plodding behemoths, stubborn and unwilling to leave.
— Fiddles McMonkeypants, Hidden Chapter Winter 2012
This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?
— Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes
Brass shines with constant usage, a beautiful dress needs wearing,Leave a house empty, it rots.
— Ovid, The Erotic Poems
And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.
— Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
I saw a news report recently that measured average video game use by American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five: twenty hours per week. Do you mean the flower of America's masculinity can't think of anything more important to do with twenty hours a week than sit in front of a video screen? Folks, this ain't normal. Can't we unplug already?
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
Too often we only identify the crucial points in our lives in retrospect. At the time we are too absorbed in the fetid detail of the moment to spot where it is leading us. But not this time. I was experiencing one of my dad’s deafening moments. If my life could be understood as a meal of many courses (and let’s be honest, much of it actually was), then I had finished the starters and I was limbering up for the main event. So far, of course, I had made a stinking mess of it. I had spilled the wine. I had dropped my cutlery on the floor and sprayed the fine white linen with sauce. I had even spat out some of my food because I didn’t like the taste of it.“But it doesn’t matter because, look, here come the waiters. They are scraping away the debris with their little horn and steel blades, pulled with studied grace from the hidden pockets of their white aprons. They are laying new tablecloths, arranging new cutlery, placing before me great domed wine glasses, newly polished to a sparkle. There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. I will not push the plate away from me, the food only half eaten. I am ready for everything they are preparing to serve me. Be in no doubt; it will all be fine.” (pp.115-6)
— Jay Rayner, Eating Crow: A Novel of Apology
There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.
— John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
The calendar is a human invention
—  time does not exist on the spiritual level.
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.
— Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
I had a sneaking suspicion that time was not constant, but I guess I could never prove it. I suppose it didn’t really matter. I even had a theory that time didn’t go in straight line at all. I knew I was no Albert Einstein, but I had the sneaking suspicion that everything had happened, was happening, or would happen was really happening all the time. There was no past, present, and future. Everything was going on all at once and forever. If that was true, then each moment was eternity.
— Mark A. Roeder
These were reflections that required some time to soften
—  but time will do almost every thing…
Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
And the time sundials tellMay be minutes and hours. But it may just as wellBe seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours.Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles,Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files(They do move like seconds—just watch their feet go:Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you growThat whatever there is in a garden, the sunCounts up on its dial. By the time it is doneOur sundial—or someone's— will certainly addAll the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.And if anyone's here for the finish, the sunWill have told him—by sundial—how well we have done.How well we have done, or how badly. Alas,That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass.
— John Ciardi, The Monster Den: or Look What Happened at My House — and to It
The gnomons's shadow falls where it falls - and so do we. Where we are now is where a lifetime's worth of steps have taken us.
— Samantha Sotto, Before Ever After
Good plan," Freddy was saying. "Let's get some decent sleep. Tomorrow we can shake our gravy asses into town and do some sluething.
— Ali Sparkes, Frozen in Time
Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork.Dava Sobel
— Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
she might have been pretty when she started out, but the world had moved on since then.
— Stephen King
What's fame, after all? It can be what someone writes on your tombstone.
— Peter Duncan
Dry snow coming down in the hills. Magpies hair-triggered and thuggish in worn trees. A wall has started to fall in you, it will take years to land.
— Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills
It was nice to borrow a slice of extra time.
— Francesca Marciano, Casa Rossa
The clock sweats out each minuteof what meat is left to us.
— Joseph Bathanti, This Metal
Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.
— August Wilhelm Schlegel
For Heidegger, boredom is a privileged fundamental mood because it leads us directly into the very problem complex of being and time.
— Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
Above a certain level of income, the relative value of material consumption vis-a-vis leisure time is diminished, so earning a higher income at the cost of working longer hours may reduce the quality of your life. More importantly, the fact that the citizens of a country work longer than others in comparable countries does not necessarily mean that they like working longer hours. They may be compelled to work long hours, even if they actually want to take longer holidays.
— Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
No really. If you only have seven years left, that means the Reaper will be dropping round for tea and buns in about 61,000 hours from now. You therefore shouldn’t be wasting time by pootling to the garden centre at walking pace. So come on, grandad. The clock’s ticking. Pedal to the metal. Or you’ll be in your flowerbed before the plants you bought.
— Jeremy Clarkson
You have carried a branch of tomorrow into the room-its frangrance awakened me.
— Robert Duncan
Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West