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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

—Jane Austen, 1814

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

—Edith Wharton, 1905

There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

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

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

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

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

—John Berger, 1984

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

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

—Simone Weil, 1947

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

—Myrtle Reed, 1910