Ethiopian Proverb Quotes

We don’t get to replay history.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

Time is death.

The past is buried and I mourn it with greater pain than many among you, because no human power can awaken it when the Crown itself has scattered ashes upon the coffin.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

No. The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends.

What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain-- What is gone is gone.

After a while you learn that everything stops.

We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; Today will die tomorrow; Time stoops to no man's lure.

What came is gone forever every time

The present no matter what I brought couldn’t change the past. The Past was set and sealed.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.