Temporal Structure Quotes

Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.

The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once

There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

We parcel up time into years and months and days because without compartmentalisation the tundra of time is impossible to navigate.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Music is geometry in time.

Architecture has a strong link with the movies in terms of time progression, sequencing, framing, all of that.

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

There is a sequence of events in our lives and so there's a temporal aspect to our experience that brings by itself, sense into the story. In other words, you were not walking before you were born and you were not doing X and Y before you did something else first. So there's a sequencing of events that imposes a certain structure to the story.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.