John Fowles Quotes

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

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

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

What business does memory have with time?

what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; it is exceedingly long,--it is exceedingly short.

You'll find as you grow older that you weren't born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

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.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Aside from Velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

Time is just memory Mixed in with Desire.

The Universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.

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.

Life can seem short or life can seem long, depending on how you live it.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. 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. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.