Quotes about timing
page 36

E.L. Doctorow photo
Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Ernest J. Gaines photo
Juliet Marillier photo
Richard Brautigan photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Barbara Kingsolver photo
Suzanne Collins photo

“Better not to give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

Variant: It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.
Source: Mockingjay

Azar Nafisi photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Anne Lamott photo
Milan Kundera photo

“Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: Farewell Waltz

Miranda July photo
John Updike photo
Matt Haig photo
George Carlin photo
Elizabeth Wurtzel photo
Karen Marie Moning photo
Joss Whedon photo

“Time for some thrillin' heroics.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film
Daniel Handler photo
Jenny Han photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Jeff Lindsay photo
Arthur Rimbaud photo
Marcel Duchamp photo

“To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, The Creative Act', 1957
Context: Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

Jane Yolen photo

“Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.”

Jane Yolen (1939) American speculative fiction and children's writer

Source: The Books of Great Alta

Chuck Palahniuk photo
Emma Donoghue photo
Anne Michaels photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Megan Whalen Turner photo
Joseph Heller photo
Tom Robbins photo
G. Edward Griffin photo
Richelle Mead photo
Richelle Mead photo
Annie Dillard photo
Francine Prose photo

“Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.”

Francine Prose (1947) American writer

Source: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Esther Perel photo
Vikram Seth photo
Harper Lee photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“The time is always right to do what’s right.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Speech delivered in Finney Chapel at Oberlin College (22 October 1964), as reported in "When MLK came to Oberlin" by Cindy Leise, The Chronicle-Telegram (21 January 2008) http://chronicle.northcoastnow.com/2008/01/21/when-mlk-came-to-oberlin/
1960s
Variant: The time is always right to do what’s right.

Wendell Berry photo
Robert Silverberg photo

“If I looked like him,” Tara said. “I’d want to have sex with myself. All the time.”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: Simply Irresistible

Dan Brown photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Nick Hornby photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Abigail Adams photo

“These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Quincy Adams (19 January 1780)
Context: These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Context: These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Lucille Ball photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Warren Buffett photo

“Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Statement of January 1991, as quoted in Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett (2007) by Andrew Kilpatrick

William Blake photo

“Children of the future Age
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

A Little Girl Lost, st. 1
1790s, Songs of Experience (1794)

Sarah Dessen photo

“Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous.
---Hobbes”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

15 Nov 90
Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons

Agatha Christie photo
Brian Selznick photo
Robert Fulghum photo
Jerry Garcia photo
Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Anthony Powell photo
Salman Rushdie photo

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Pythagoras photo

“We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 23, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations http://archive.org/details/dictionaryquota02harbgoog (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 320

Robert Anton Wilson photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
Charles Bukowski photo

“how can you be true and
kind at the same
time?

how?”

Source: Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories

Isabel Allende photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Kelley Armstrong photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Richelle Mead photo
John Keats photo

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death”

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: The Complete Poems
Context: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.