Temporal Distance Quotes

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

there are many hours and minutes between now and tomorrowand in any one of them-even in a minute,the house falls

Five hundred years from now, who'll know the difference?!

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

In the words of the old song, it's a long time from May to December but, you know, it's an equally long time from December to May.

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

Distance... is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

Distance of Time and Place do really cure what they seem to aggravate; and taking Leave of our Friends resembles taking Leave of the World, concerning which it hath been often said, that it is not Death but Dying which is terrible.

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.

When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.

Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.

Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.

Just because something is three months away and seems far off, doesn't mean you will want to be there when the time comes.

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

In her previous novels, Maggie O'Farrell has often measured the distance between intimates and the unexpected intimacy of distance - geographic, temporal, cultural. In 'The Hand That First Held Mine' and 'The Distance Between Us,' characters separated by many miles or many years turn out to be joined in ways they never anticipated.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.

If I make a film about now, the minute it was done, it wouldn't be about now; it'd be about then.