Hal Borland Quotes

Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.

Every white man seemed to have a great concern about time. We enjoyed time, they measured it…. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we never thought of them.

Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

My ideas about time all developed from the realization that if nothing were to change we could not say that time passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it.

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

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time. We can't even comprehend it. It's such an illusion, it's such a strange thing.

Time sometimes passes quite quickly.

Is time our invention, or is time a real thing... I realize we're measuring it, but in the cosmic scheme of things, is there really time?

You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.

Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.

There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.

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

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

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

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

Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time--weeks, months, years, decades even.

A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time.

Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.

We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.

It's not five minutes to midnight. It's five minutes after midnight.

A recent conversation: Dubya: Look at the clock, time is racing! Cheney: That's the second hand, George.

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

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.

Time can tick when there is no clock.