time19 quotes

“I do not and will not fear tomorrow because I feel as though today has been enough.”

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

“Nothing seemed to happen except what always happened, at its regular time and in its regular way. The traffic got heavy and then it got lighter. The day was hot and now it was cooler. The shadows hid underground and now they oozed up and spread everywhere like spilled oil. It was summer but soon it would be fall. The sun would set and the horizon would glow red and orange like embers. Even Clemons’s crimes and wanderings fit into the fixed order. One broken life did nothing to disturb the workings of the world.

Everything the same even in its changes. Every scrap of matter, every last acorn or spot of sunlight changing just as it should, blending into its opposite or morphing into a being wholly unlike it. In all movement and bustle and chaos and noise there was a profound stillness and silence, something abiding yet unknowable.”

“How you spend your days is, of course, how you spend your life. What we do with this hour, or that one, is what we are doing.”

“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?”

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“Oakeshott believed that we might consider becoming less preoccupied with the world of getting and spending, less prone to measure our well-being in quantitative terms, allowing ourselves to find delight in the poetic interstices of the daily world. This means looking for the possibilities available to us in the present, not always thinking that we must commit ourselves to what may come in the future. Abstracting ourselves from present circumstances, a liberation that is at best partial, for the sake of an idyllic future, moves us toward constant dissatisfaction and anxiety, thinking that all present accomplishments are of little value compared with a hypothetical perfection that we have taught ourselves to seek.”

“Sometimes a man’s experience is like the sweep second hand on a clock, touching each point in its circuit, but always the arcs of movement repeating.”

Dὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.

“You cannot step twice into the same river.”

“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?

No.

It’s never like what you expected.

Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.”

“We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

“Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?”

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

“The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

“Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?

Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?

Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?

They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,

Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”

“Time was like water but I was the sea: I wouldn’t have noticed it passing.”

“Where you been is good and gone, all you keep’s the gettin’ there.”