Passage Of Time Quotes

“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them.

[Inside Out (VH1)]”
― Warren Zevon

“Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems

“After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven, shall behold the night of our solemnities.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“If the whole world I once could see
On free soil stand, with the people free
Then to the moment might I say,
Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.”
― Goethe, Faust, First Part

“They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!'
'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering.
'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“But misfortunes do not last forever (this they have in common with joys) but pass away or are at least diminished and become lost in oblivion. Life on the kapia always renews itself despite everything and the bridge does not change with the years or with the centuries or with the most painful turns in human affairs. All these pass over it, even as the unquiet waters pass beneath its smooth and perfect arches.”
― Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina

“Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“A day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Beneath a romantic, yet melancholic dusk sky,
the roads continue meandering, in their
own rhythm, as I gazed into them,
moments continue scattering
as I kept living them.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”
― Isaac Watts

“Steadfast Seas and Mountains

The lofty mountains and the seas,
Being mountains, being seas,
Both exist and are real.
But frail as flowers are the lives of men,
Passing phantoms of this world.”
― Reiko Chiba, Hiroshige's Tokaido in Prints and Poetry

“Be not afraid of whirlpools,
of strong winds, and murky waves.
Fear the creature that dwells
in the darkest depths,
the ice-shackled Kraken,
that threatens to surface
and your soul to keep.”
― Erna Grcic, Beneath the Surface

“Maggots gnaw on time
Glistening ghostly in dark crevices
As I wait, resigned”
― Erna Grcic, Beneath the Surface

“November 12, 1954 Unarticulated time is not measurable; strictly speaking, where there are no events, there is no time.”
― Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries

“It has all gone so fast, Duke. Like a dream. How is it the days crawl by and yet the years fly?”
― Lawrence Sanders, The Anderson Tapes

“Could I ever feel any less for this body? Why does ardour pass? Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

“The passage of time is as real as the movement of an animated object.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The game he loved, that America loved, had passed him by, left him enamored more of its past than of its present or future. It had grown younger as he grew older.”
― Maury Klein, Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball with the 1911 New York Giants

“With the passing of its last marcher, Rube Marquard, the parade vanished into the mists of time, leaving in its wake only memories of the men and deeds gone by.”
― Maury Klein, Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball with the 1911 New York Giants

“Antoníto clucked and clicked his arms in mimicry of a clock. When its human hands reached straight out, time stopped. There he lay absolutely still, a cruciform putto on sand angel wings, staring at a Michelangelo sky.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

“Only we pass through time, measuring our growth and observing our disappearance. Time does not pass. Time does not measure us; instead, we measure time and are the measure of time.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“The concept of waiting, of being patient, had seemed so simple before. Not any longer. Where once I thought we had time to figure things out, now I knew there would never be enough of it. I'd been told my whole life that time was on my side, and I'd been lied to. I saw it now for what it was: time was amorphous, fluid, a thing without beginning or end, a thing that had the power to speed up or stop, a thing I could neither grasp nor control. Time had betrayed me, and I no longer trusted it would be there. Everything was urgent. Everything had to be done immediately.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“As I went back to the party the sadness of all the forgetting stung me. Even already, I thought, time is at work; time is ticking her away; time is destroying her, killing all there was between us. And with time on my side I would look back on the day without bitterness and without emotion. I would remember it only as a flash on the brittle surface of nothing, as a day that was rather funny, as the day we got drunk on cake.”
― William Trevor, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories

“هر یکشنبه شب، پس از مراسم شامگاه در نمازخانه ی مدرسه، چتریس نام شاگردان قدیمی را که در جنگ کشته شده بودند می خواند و زندگینامه ی کوتاهی از آنها را چاشنی سخن می کرد. بسیار هیجان انگیز بود؛ اما چیپس، نشسته بر نیمکت دراز نمازخانه، به خود می گفت: برای چتریس آنها چیزی جز نام نیستند؛ او قیافه ی آنها را آن طور که من می بینم، نمی بیند....”
― James Hilton, Good-Bye Mr. Chips

“Funny how someone you thought of every waking moment for months, how a type of longing that was so significant it became a building block of your identity, eventually slips wholly from your mind.”
― Austin Taylor, Notes on Infinity