Gabrielle Zevin 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.

I'm really freaked out by time. How, for instance, what I did last week is not real in the sense that it's happened. It's just a memory that's filed away in my brain.

I can't believe I'm 29. Where did the years go? Why did the years go?

How confusing the beams from memory's lamp are; One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. What is the secret of the trick? How did I get so old so quick?

It's funny, when you're a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you're on the fast train to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me.

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time." "Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours.

There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

Old is always fifteen years from now.

Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

People complain that life is short,for me it seems very long.

This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.

One's relationship to time is complicated, and sometimes a day will drag on forever and sometimes it'll be over in a flash. When you look back, "I'm old," after 40 or 60 years, I can't believe I'm as old as I am.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

It is a characteristic of old age to find the progress of time accelerated. The less one accomplishes in a given time, the shorter does the retrospect appear.

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?