Time Passing Quotes

“Es zinu mirkļus dienas garumā un dienas mirkļa īsumā.”
― Imants Ziedonis, Epifānijas

“Our life is made up of time. Our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. [...] And yet time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could.”
― Cecelia Ahern

“One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.”
― Jack Henry Abbott

“Brass shines with constant usage, a beautiful dress needs wearing,
Leave a house empty, it rots.”
― Ovid, The Erotic Poems

“Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live.”
― Irving Layton, The Selected Poems

“Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Because with time blocking out the bad, memory is always bound to be a bit naive and stupidly optimistic.”
― Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China

“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”
― Salaman Rushdie

“Liminal moments. Those moments apart from time when you are gripped. Taken. When you are so fully absorbed in what you are doing that time ceases to exist.
Those early morning birthday moments were liminal, Sidda thought. Momma knew how to embrace liminality inspite of (or maybe because of) her emotional acrobatics. Momma taught me rapture.”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“..it just seemed as if she were marking time while life rocketed past.”
― Soheir Khashoggi, Nadia's Song

“Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Enjoying Life’s Pace:
Waiting really shouldn’t be an occupation…things will happen when they happen and not one minute sooner.

That is the way of life; it runs at its own pace.

Enjoy as many minutes as you can.”
― Rob Kozak, Finding Fatherhood

“I stood before her asserting my age, but in truth not knowing where the years had gone or how they had led up to this moment.”
― David Dabydeen, The Intended

“Time always wins and it does it with a reminder.”
― Eduvie Donald

“Things can sometimes move slowly here on Earth. More often, thought, they move quickly so use your time well. It will be gone before you know it.”
― Oliver Jeffers

“Time, however, the cruel mistress of the living, had run out.”
― Bert-Oliver Boehmer, Galacticide

“Fixei meu olhar o máximo que pude naquele ponteiro preto que rastejava sobre o fundo branco do relógio, e pensei: que trabalho ele tem o dia todo para realizar um breve encontro, enquanto a outra flecha curta, parada, o espera com frieza, pendurada como uma estaca sobre a cabeça! Apesar disso, se ambos se encontrassem, se abraçassem e lá permanecesse, morreriam ali, como todos os desejos que se esvaem ou diminuem quando se realizam.”
― Ghassan Kanafani, ما تبقى لكم

“Time (as is well known) sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a worm. But a man feels particularly happy when he doesn't even notice whether it's passing quickly or quietly.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I couldn‘t help but think how time keeps slipping away.”
― Wajid Shaikh, Sukoon

“I wonder when you stop marking time, as an adult - when life starts. What would I even do with it if I had the freedom - live?”
― Catriona Ward, Looking Glass Sound

“Time passing was life passing, I thought. It was life that flowed swiftly along in one direction and could not be seized or stopped. And this was something that weighed on grown-ups, an inexorable force that they feared.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“- Nadie lo sabe, señor Baker. Hay misterios que quizá nunca consigamos resolver, por mucho que nos esforcemos. Y si nos pasamos demasiado tiempo intentando resolverlos, tal vez nos pase inadvertido lo que tenemos delante de las narices.”
― T.J. Klune, La casa en el mar más azul. Edición especial: Edición especial con cantos tintados

“Today - not even that, for already it was tomorrow - would slide away like all the other days. Not a red letter day. Not the day of my desperate bidding. Not the day on which the love of my life was snaffled away from me. I opened the front door and looked out into the night. It was cold and uncomforting. I liked it like that. I hated the moment, yet I loved it because in it I still loved Lucy.”
― William Trevor, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories

“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

“It’s really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space‌—‌that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.”
― Peter S Beagle, The Last Unicorn #1

“What parts of ourselves had we offered up freely, and which had slipped away unnoticed, like change from a pocket?”
― Anca-Valeria Bancila, The Time Traveler

“Don't be ashamed for doomscrolling and playing silly mobile games. This is a unique time in human history, this opportunity will never return. You'll incarnate forever, and a part of you will miss these things. Don't miss it now.”
― Sebastyne Alpha

“La vie est jeune. En vieillissant, elle se fait durée, elle se fait temps, elle se fait adieu. Elle vous a tout pris, et elle n'a plus rien à vous donner.”
― Romain Gary

“I remembered another evening, when I caught him standing outside on the porch staring out at the deserted quadrangle. It had just snowed and the place couldn't have looked more peaceful or more timeless. I told him not to worry and promised I'd shovel the snow in the morning. "It's not that," he said. I knew it wasn't. He put his arm on my shoulder, which he never did, because he wasn't the touchy-feely sort. "I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking that one day I won't be here to see it and I know I'll miss it, even if I won't have a heartbeat to miss anything. I miss it now for the-days-when, the way I miss places I've never traveled to or things I've never done." "What things that you've never done?" "You're young and you're very handsome how could you possibly understand?" He removed his arm. He lived in a future that wouldn't be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn't been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward. I felt for him.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“The early years were so packed with everything that one year seemed like like a very long time, as of course it was. It is only when the years begin to repeat themselves that they seem to be gone almost instantly.”
― William Saroyan, Places Where I've Done Time