Time Quotes

“Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.”

“Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the the time. They played. THEY were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old.”

“How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.(...)Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.”

“There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.”

“You know how we’re thinking about food these days, less in terms of carbs and calories than in terms of color, vivacity, and life force? We can do the same with time. Then it’s no longer about having enough of it but about infusing color and vivacity and life force into every moment. (279)”

“I just realized at some point that I was hopelessly in love with the theater. I fought it for a long time because I thought theater was for, you know, insufferable actors.”

“A lot of my friends, when I was 14 or 15, they were all up and down, wanting to go out on a Friday night, and my dad had me working really late on Fridays and Saturday mornings and even on Sunday mornings. And when I'd finished all that, we used to spend the rest of the time talking about boxing.”

“Getting a star player in the NBA is not impossibly hard, but close. It requires either an incredible amount of luck, or an amazing amount of time, or some other way to try and get at it.”

“Lest anyone dispute that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God but rather the direct and dictated Word of God, let us consider the uniqueness of the 66 books of the Bible. Why is it that we can tell that a certain book of the Bible was written by one author rather than another? Why do the different books of the Bible use different languages (e.g., Greek, Hebrew) and different vocabularies? Why are the styles of books like Proverbs and Chronicles so different from one another? It is because people were vessels for the inspiration of God, but they were not empty vessels; God did not bypass their humanity. The way in which these people recorded their encounters with God bears the indelible stamp of their place in time, their culture, and their individual personalities.”

“And then after a while he got me a job at the video store next door. I used to lock up the store and go next door and hang out all the time and watch movies and stuff.”

“That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

“We've protected thousands of people in Libya; we have not seen a single U.S. casualty; there's no risks of additional escalation. This operation is limited in time and in scope.”

“My buddies all still make fun of me about the whole 'Leprechaun' thing, and I'm proud of that movie. I'm just as proud of that work as I am of anything else that I've done. I feel like where I was in my career at the time, I committed to the character.”

“I really get up every day and try to deal with the problems that are in front of me, and I don't really worry about history. That will work itself out over time.”

“Most of the time, people say negative things for a reaction, and I can't even bear to give them the satisfaction. So there's something that I gain from feeling like I'm the bigger person, from walking away from a situation.”

“I came in on time, I was always a professional.”

“For me, it's always just taking your time, biding your time, doing what you can when you can with what you got.”

“I'm not happy that death is approaching because I like being alive but I'm glad I've escaped the two-post-a-day economy of contemporary journalism. Good writing takes time.”

“Like everyone else, I have my quirks. For one, I have to own only black cars and the registration has to have eights. It's not something I can explain, it's just there. Another obsession I have is smell. I have to smell good all the time.”

“SimpleComplex systems can arisefrom simple rules.It”