E. L. Doctorow Quotes

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

Time never bears such moments on his wing as when he flies too swiftly to be marked.

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.

For every minute, the future is becoming the past.

Time flies never to be recalled.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

It's almost mind-boggling how time flies.

Half a page--and the morning is already ancient.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.

She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then.

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Dor shook his head. “The phrase. What does it mean?” Sarah wondered if he was kidding. “Time flies? You know, like, time goes really fast and suddenly you’re saying goodbye and it’s like no time passed at all?” His eyes drifted. He liked it. “Time flies.” “With you,” she added.

Time is short and full, like an outgrown Frock - .

Every year you wait, long ago gets farther away.

The night that seemed endless hours before is now slipping through your fingers, ticking by as it falls into the past and pushes you towards the future.

Time, where did you go? / Why did you leave me here alone? / Wait, don't go so fast / I'm missing the moments as they pass