Quotes by British Authors - Page 711

Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.
Jane Austen
Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.
Jeanette Winterson
The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?
Jeanette Winterson
I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
Terry Pratchett
Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.
Jonathan Nolan
You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.
Jonathan Nolan
The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.
Terry Pratchett
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
G.K. Chesterton
For he lives twice who can at once employ,The present well, and e’en the past enjoy.
Alexander Pope
Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.
Charles Caleb Colton
The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.
Emily Brontë
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Tom Stoppard
It will happen but it will take time.
John Bowlby
But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.
Chris Wooding
Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
Julian Barnes
If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." ~ Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
If you have sixty seconds worth of distance...run!
Chris Stevenson
There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,” she explained. “There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere—it doesn’t all get used up at once.” “I may still be hung over,” sighed Richard. “That almost made sense.
Neil Gaiman
Every second counts
Dorothy Koomson
History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
Julian Barnes
I got tired of feeling like Dracula. I wanted to see some daylight, and not just at six o’clock in the morning.
Kate Moss
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them.
C.S. Lewis
Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
C.S. Lewis
I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different
Graham Greene
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett
We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.
Clive Barker
The proper, wise balancingof one's whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
Arnold Bennett
We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.
Arthur Machen
The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless
Robert Aickman
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.
Virginia Woolf
Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
Ian McEwan
She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!
Elizabeth Gaskell
Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?
Mary Balogh
There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and create,And time for all the works and days of handsThat lift and drop a question on your plate;Time for you and time for me,And time yet for a hundred indecisions,And for a hundred visions and revisions,Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favored heroes attain-not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C.S. Lewis
What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
Jeanette Winterson
...people change, even good people, if they get the wrong thing in their head. And not everything is always what it looks like and sometimes just because one person looks weak, they might be very strong, and another person might look like a spooky freak but he might be one of the kindest people you'd ever meet. And I guess I learned that time is slippery...We have to enjoy every second, love with all our hearts, all we can, while we can.
Lee Thompson
This world is out of date
Kamila Shamsie
Time did not compose her.
Jane Austen
Time is the enemy of identity
Michael Moorcock
The most precious thing I have to give is my time.
Silvia Hartmann
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
Terry Pratchett
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?
Ian McEwan
You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
Margery Williams Bianco
Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.
Yahtzee Croshaw
I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
Nick Hornby
Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one is smaller.
Elif Shafak
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
Henry James
About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.
Xiaolu Guo
The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.
Jeanette Winterson
There is always time for another last minute
Terry Pratchett
Every moment is the paradox of now or never.
Simon Van Booy
And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.
Meg Rosoff
I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.
Terry Pratchett
It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
Alan Moore
For after the Battle comes quiet.
H.G.Wells
This thing all things devours:Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;Gnaws iron, bites steel;Grinds hard stones to meal;Slays king, ruins town,And beats high mountain down.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...
Elizabeth Goudge
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
J.G. Ballard
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
C.S. Lewis