Russell Hoban Quotes

A few years ago, I got to a point where I realised that the only way you can tell someone's age is how they live their life. The candles on the cake mean absolutely nothing.

If you change your relationship with time, you will change your life. The most important time of your life is right now.

I'm just too busy living every day to really spend a lot of time thinking 'am I old?' I'm this age. I am in this moment and in this life.

Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance

And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.

Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.

It's never too late to get good at something.

There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.

Certainly. But take this into consideration: of every ten problems we have, nine are created by our own selves - through guilt, self-punishment, self-pity. However, from time to time a great obstacle appears in our path, which was put there by God, and which is there for a reason. The reason is: to give us the opportunity to change everything, to move forwards.

The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

The truth about forever is that it is happening right now.

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not 'this moment.' Is this not a fact?

The time on either side of now stands fast.

I'm right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age ...if only each generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive ... the time to flower is now.

I think that before my son was born, I didn't have a strong sensation for future. I was living in this kind of never-ending present.

Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not this moment? This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from. The one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens. No matter how much your life changes. One thing is certain. Its always now. Since there is no escape from the now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

I think that when you're in your twenties you think about your future, when you're in your thirties you're raising kids and you think about their future, but when you get to a time when you are diagnosed with any kind of life altering illness, what did you take away from it? And what I took away from it was how to live in the "now".

The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. Yesterday was the present to you when you experienced it, and tomorrow will be also the present when you experience it. Therefore, experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.