Sunday, January 1, 2012 – It’s About Time!
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
The Present is a Point just passed. ~ David Russell
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
The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. ~ Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness
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
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
The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology. ~ Sean M. Carroll, Scientific American, June 2008
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
Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more–let me see–more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps … as prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. ~ KEN KESEY, Sometimes a Great Notion
A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time. ~ Susan Glaspell, “Tickless Time”
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 life 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
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
Just Above Sunset 