“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.”
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher
“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
Last update June 9, 2022. History
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Susan Sontag168
American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist 1933–2004Related quotes
Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)
“Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.”
John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist
Wheeler quoted this saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (1990), p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false, with a footnote attributing it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Later publications, such as Paul Davies' 1995 book About Time (p. 236), credited Wheeler with variations of this saying, but the quip is actually much older. The earliest known source is Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21094 Ch. V: " 'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.' " It also appears in his 1929 novel The Man Who Mastered Time. http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor The earliest known occurrence other than Cummings is from 1962 in Film Facts: Volume 5, p. 48 http://books.google.com/books?id=sr0vAQAAIAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22. <br class="br">Misattributed
Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 184; this also has been quoted as "What happens once will never happen again. But what happens twice will surely happen a third time."
“But just because you bury something, that doesn’t mean it stops existing.”
Jenny Han (1980) American writer
Source: We'll Always Have Summer
Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards
Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 6 (p. 59)