Jess Walter Quotes

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

What business does memory have with time?

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.

The velocity with which time flies is infinite, as is most apparent to those who look back.

Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn't really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

In your head, a sunset can go on for days

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

What is reality if it isn't how we feel about things?

Time is just memory Mixed in with Desire.

How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'