Archive

Quotes

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, 1989

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

—Tennessee Williams, 1951

They say, “We only have the life of this world. We die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time.” Yet, not true knowledge have they of this—only belief.

—The Qur’an, c. 620

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

—John Berger, 1984

We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.

—Joseph Addison, 1711

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive. 

—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BC

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

—Simone Weil, 1947