Bel Kaufman Quotes

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

I was thinking about how disjointedly time seemed to flow, passing in a blur at times, with single images standing out more clearly than others. And then, at other times, every second was significant, etched in my mind.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life---real life---seems to exist at one remove.

Time was a funny and fickle thing. Sometimes there was never enough of it, and other times it stretched out endlessly.

Time is an experience in consciousness. It is metabolized as our biological clock. Changing our experience of time can reverse aging.

In Einstein's equation, time is a river. It speeds up, meanders, and slows down. The new wrinkle is that it can have whirlpools and fork into two rivers. So, if the river of time can be bent into a pretzel, create whirlpools and fork into two rivers, then time travel cannot be ruled out.

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.

On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

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

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

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.

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

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

In music the present is extended.

We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

The biggest change is that time just goes by so fast when you're on the road. It seems like it's only been a month or so since I've been back and it's already been more than half a year. I can't complain, though. I'm in a great spot right and it's up to me to take advantage of it while I can.

Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.

Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.

Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

Our bodies are the time machine.