John Steinbeck Quotes

Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

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

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

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

I've only been gone a week," I reminded him. Well, a week's a long time. It's seven days. Which is one hundred and sixty-eight hours. Which is ten thousand, eighty minutes. Which is six hundred thousand, for hundred seconds.

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.

These tenses-past, present and future-are not the tenses of time; they are tenses of the mind. That which is no longer before the mind becomes the past. That which is before the mind is the present. And that which is going to be before the mind is the future. Past is that which is no longer before you. Future is that which is not yet before you. And present is that which is before you and is slipping out of your sight. Soon it will be past.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don't notice whether it's passing quickly or slowly.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Because time isn't something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.

How can time be long or short? Time is without length or breadth. The question is, what happened during its passing. And what happened is, our lives have been joined together.

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

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

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

Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.

It's proven that how time moves for you depends on where you are in the universe. It's relative to beings and other places. But on the level of being here on earth, if you are aware in a moment, one second can last a year. And if you are unaware, your whole childhood, your whole life can pass by in six seconds. But it’s also such a thing that you can get lost in.

With age, it really becomes thinking about how time has passed - that's sort of the root of age.

What is time? If I am not asked, I know; if I am asked, I don't.

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.