“Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.”

— J.B. Priestley , Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 59-60.

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Do you have more details about the quote "Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step …" by J.B. Priestley?

J.B. Priestley 35

English writer 1894–1984

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Expanding Universe (1963)
Context: Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”
So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.”
I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

“Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost… What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“To ask what function the allies have is like asking what we men do in the world. We are here, that's all. And the allies are here like us; and maybe they were here before us.”

Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from A Separate Reality (Chapter 6)

“We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder book By the Shores of Silver Lake

Source: By the Shores of Silver Lake

“You have to eat before you drink! If you remember nothing else I've said tonight, remember to eat before you drink!”

Paul F. Tompkins (1968) American actor

Driven to Drink (1998)

“Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God (1994)

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Tous les changements, même les plus souhaités ont leur mélancolie, car ce que nous quittons, c'est une partie de nous-mêmes; il faut mourir à une vie pour entrer dans une autre.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

“But now we have time. Endless time stretches before us.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

“We know how to handle these murderers, these rapists, these criminals. We've done this before … in Drenica in 1946. We killed them. We killed them all. Of course we did not do it all at once. It took some time.”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Testimony of Gen. Wesley Clark at the Former Yugoslavia Tribunal
Disputed

“We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once.”

Jonathan Weiner (1953) American nonfiction writer

Source: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (1994), Chapter 17, The Stranger's Power

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J.B. Priestley 35

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