Julian Barnes Quotes

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.

Time can tick when there is no clock.

Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains.

I've got absolutely no real perception, properly, of time.

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Time does not always pass at the same speed. We are the ones who determine that speed.

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

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

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it's a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.

Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before.

The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

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

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.