Happy Tuesday everyone! It is the second day the week. It is already the last Tuesday of May and in seven days, we will be hitting midyear already. Wow. Nevertheless, I hope everyone is doing well and is safe. Oh well, Tuesday also means one thing, a Top Ten Tuesday update! Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s given topic is Book Quotes that X Fit Theme.
Ever since I started doing book reviews, book quotes have become an essential part of my every review. Nearly every review I have published is accentuated with quotations I culled from the book I just read. For this week’s post, I am picking quotes about time. It encompasses both the past, the present, and the values and importance of time itself. I have been reading a lot of historical fictions lately and I guess it is just the appropriate theme for my Top Ten Tuesday post.
I really had a challenging time picking the appropriate theme for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday update. Without more ado, here are some of my favorite quotes about time.
“The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.”
~ Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
~ Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See
“Time moves funny and it’s hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes, it only gives you one chance.”
~ Pat Conroy, South of Broad
“Causes of historical events – there are not and cannot be save the cause of all causes. But there are laws controlling these events; laws partly unknown, partly accessible to us. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we entirely give up looking for a cause in the will of one man, just as the discovery of the laws of motions of the planets has only become possible since men have given up the conception of the earth being stationary.”
~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
“The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking of the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.”
~ John Banville, The Sea
“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”
~ George Eliot, Middlemarch
“Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed quietus.”
~ John Banville, The Sea
“When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just a single theme; he will come to realize it only when his life begins to enact its first variations.”
~ Milan Kundera, Immortality
“At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.”
~ Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
“And time is a curious thing. Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us. A few days, weeks, years. One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be live for. Memories, perhaps.”
~ Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
I hope you enjoyed these quotes. Happy Tuesday everyone! And I hope you have a great week ahead!
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 