“Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way.”
“The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.”
Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 47 (p. 238).
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Ian McDonald 30
British science fiction novelist 1960Related quotes
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”
Attribution debunked in Langworth's Churchill by Himself. First known appearance is in a 1992 usenet post https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=rec.arts.comics.misc/EMj3ZowKq1U/E0dsEBwdZEgJ.
Misattributed
Source: Google books link https://books.google.com/books?id=vbsU21fEhLAC&q=average+voter#v=snippet&q=average%20voter&f=false
“I can't watch TV longer than five minutes without praying for nuclear holocaust.”
The Dance of the Hours
Don Camillo and the Prodigal Sun (1952)
“Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.”
“Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat.”
Frothingham, Jessie Peabody. Sea Fighters from Drake to Farragut New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902. p. 314
1800s
Funeral in Berlin (1964; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) pp. 144-5
Described there as a joke current in 1960s Czechoslovakia