Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

To-morrow — oh, 'twill never be, If we should live a thousand years! Our time is all to-day, to-day, The same, though changed; and while it flies With still small voice the moments say: "To-day, to-day, be wise, be wise.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.

The present moment, if you think about it, is the only time there is. No matter what time it is, it is always now.

Robert, you are just a transient. I have seen them come and I have seen them go and I’ll be here long after you have gone.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I love the fact that tomorrow never comes. You can never wake up and say, 'It's tomorrow.' It's always today.

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.

The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated; and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.

I thought yesterday was the first day of the rest of my life but it turns out today is.

There is no later. This is later.

Most of us take for granted that time flies, meaning that it passes too quickly. But in the mindful state, time doesn't really pass at all. There is only a single instant of time that keeps renewing itself over and over with infinite variety.

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

The future is an infinite succession of presents.