Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

Ah! the clock is always slow; it is later than you think.

Age isn't important until you run out of it.

Time just gets away from us.

Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think.

Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

What Time Is It? You Mean Now?

The bell strikes One. We take no note of time But from its loss. To give it then a tongue Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke, I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright, It is the knell of my departed hours.

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

The clock never stops, never stops, never waits. We're growing old. It's getting late.

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.

Time is numbered only to man.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever.

Every white man seemed to have a great concern about time. We enjoyed time, they measured it…. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we never thought of them.

No one is so old that he cannot live yet another year, nor so young that he cannot die today.

For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite.

Time moves on for everyone.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives. That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.

The trouble is that you think you have time.