Time

"What is far is very close, and what is close is very far"

"[T]he people who are close to Allah worry so much about wasting time that they call themselves to account for every breath they spend - how many of us wonder about how we spend our day, let alone each breath?"

"It is still this moment and that will be true of every moment that follows, assuming this moment ever ends, which, if I am lucky, it won't."

"And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind."

"Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical."

"Gradually it became known that the new race had a definite purpose, and that purpose was to chart and possess the whole country, regardless of the rights of its earlier inhabitants. Still the old chiefs cautioned their people to be patient, for, said they, the land is vast, both races can live on it, each in their own way. Let us therefore befriend them and trust their friendship. While they reasoned thus, the temptations of graft and self-aggrandizement overtook some of the leaders."

"You must not think of time as a quantity, a period, a measure. Look at the sky," Gwynneth said. "The moon has now slipped away to another night, into another world. It was not the time it was here that you remember, Faolan, but rather the luminescence of the air, the blue shadows cast by the trees in its light. It was not the length of the time but the quality of the moon's light that you felt and remember." Gwynneth paused. "It is the value, the quality that lives on."

"Esoteric things progress not according to time, but by activity, they can be slow or quick, depending upon the efforts made."

"The great opposition to reading is what I allow to fill my time instead of reading. To say we have no time to read is not really true; we simply have chosen to use our time for other things, or have allowed our time to be filled to the exclusion of reading. So don't add reading to your to-do list. Just stop doing the things that keep you from doing it. But read."

"Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?"

"Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience."

"The only currency that we really have to spend during our lives is time. Everything else is just a sub-category."

"But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit. Of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here. It is not explainable or even justifiable. It is itself the justifier. We do not make it. If it did not happen to us, we could not imagine it. It includes the world and time as a pregnant woman includes her child whose wrongs she will suffer and forgive. It is in the world but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here."

"... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time."

"Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time."

"Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all."

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."

"The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting."

"I always wanted to know what it is right. Maybe we know each other from time immemorial, if you know that in you is the eternal energy of goodness, which is most important for you."

"Time. For some it was a great healer, the ultimate fixer of bad break-ups, shake-ups, and heartache… For others, Time was an insidious stealer of all things they want most in life, stripping it away from them by sneakily changing the rules of obtaining it… For all the joyful wishes and hopeful desires held near and dear to our hearts, Time was the one element most likely to keep it from our reach. To me, Time was all of these, and none. Time simply is. It’s the framework in which we play out the games of our lives, but the secret is not to control it. It is not to master it. It is simply to learn to exist fully within the moment, to be aware of every facet of our being, and to wring every ounce of joy from it. Perhaps we were our own thieves, lamenting the absence of even a spare moment to enjoy life, when all it really takes is to stop the complaints, take the moment firmly in hand, and make it our own. Because the secret is that Time passes, and if you let it, it will leave you in its wake, aching with every beat of your heart and in every fiber of your being for what you have missed."