For the New Decade

Sunday, December 29, 2019 – For the New Decade

Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. ~ William Faulkner

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own. ~ H. G. Wells

The clock talked loud. I threw it away. It scared me what it talked. ~ Tillie Olsen

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change. ~ Thomas Hardy

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us. ~ Max Frisch

Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, time stays, we go. ~ Henry Austin Dobson

Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Time is the longest distance between two places. ~ Tennessee Williams

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. ~ Tennessee Williams

Time moves in one direction, memory in another. ~ William Gibson

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. ~ Saint Augustine

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who’s doing all the moving. ~ Martin Amis

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours. ~ John B. Priestly

Time is a figure eight, at its center the city of Déjà Vu. ~ Robert Brault

Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow. ~ Antonio Porchia

There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now. ~ Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten

To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom. ~ Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? ~ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Time is a created thing. To say “I don’t have time” is to say “I don’t want to.” ~ Lao Tzu

The strongest of all warriors are these two: Time and Patience. ~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle. ~ Charles De Lint, The Onion Girl

Time is a lake, getting deeper year by year, drop by drop. Surface tension, the electric presence of our staccato acts, keeps us scuttling like water bugs on its surface, unmindful of the depths we traverse. We’re safe, afloat in the now, until we stop moving and begin to sink into the past. Only then do we realize how important all those yesterdays were, how they hold each present moment to the sun; and how many people we leave behind, stricken in time like ambered insects. ~ Michael Marshall, Blood of Angels

A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time. ~ Susan Glaspell

There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it’s true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going? Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second…. We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time. ~ Don Delillo, Underworld

Time has ghosts. That’s what time is: the ghost of every instant passed, haunting the potential of every moment to come. ~ Tim Lebbon, Fears Unnamed

As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment – right now – is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it. Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now – they are like a map without the “you are here” symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. ~ Craig Callender, Scientific American, June 2010

The universe may be timeless, but if you imagine breaking it into pieces, some of the pieces can serve as clocks for the others. Time emerges from timelessness. We perceive time because we are, by our very nature, one of those pieces. ~ Craig Callender, Scientific American, June 2010

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past. ~ Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. ~ Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Time only wasted when sprinkling perfume on goat farm. ~ Charlie Chan, Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case (1933)

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch. ~ Tony Hendra

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. ~ Bill Vaughan

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. ~ Charles Lamb

New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~ Mark Twain

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. ~ Mark Twain

The New Year begins in a snow-storm of white vows. ~ George William Curtis

Happiness is too many things these days for anyone to wish it on anyone lightly. So let’s just wish each other a bileless New Year and leave it at that ~ Judith Crist

New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time. ~ James Agate

It wouldn’t be New Year’s if I didn’t have regrets. ~ William Thomas

The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. ~ W. H. Auden

We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves. ~ Lynn Hall, Where Have All the Tigers Gone? (1989)

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. ~ Douglas Adams

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. ~ Oscar Wilde

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. ~ Dan Stanford

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. ~ C. S. Lewis

All human wisdom is summed up in two words – wait and hope. ~ Alexandre Dumas

I confess, I do not believe in time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked. ~ Noel Coward

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive. ~ John Sladek

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. ~ William Gibson

A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness. [Prudens futuri temporis exitum Caliginosa nocte premit deus.] – Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Carmina (III, 29, 29)

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it. ~ Ray Bradbury

Predicting the future is easy. It’s trying to figure out what’s going on now that’s hard. ~ Fritz R. S. Dressler

It is the business of the future to be dangerous. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. ~ Ambrose Bierce

When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. ~ Alan Moore

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them. ~ Charles Lamb

It takes a lot of time to be a genius; you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. ~ Gertrude Stein

Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. ~ Thomas Mann

The tiger springs in the New Year. Us he devours. ~ T. S. Eliot