Quotes about Time

The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother's. I've passed them on. Decades ahead, you'll study your own temporary hands, and you'll remember. Don't cry, this is what happens.

The bell that measures time is ringing.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.

He's a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he's fifty, and even then there's still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he's been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.

You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season.