Time - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

- H. G.Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (1895)

The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward.

- Murray Leinster, ''The Runaway Skyscraper'' (1919)

In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death.

- H. P. Lovecraft, ''TheWhite Ship'' (1919)

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

- Ray Cummings, ''The Time Professor'' (1921)

Most precious of all, you will have Time - that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it.

- James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)

Your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

- Jorge Luis Borges, ''The Garden of Forking Paths'' (1941)

Of all the energies in the universe, time is the most potent.

- A. E. van Vogt, ''The Seesaw'' (1941)

Space and Time aren't real, apart. And they aren't really different. They fade one into the other all around us.

- JackWilliamson, The Legion of Space, revised (1947)

Time on Fyon was a tangible element. It seemed to drip down lazily from the dark fronds of the palm trees, to lie in languid pools against the pink and yellow petals of the frangipani.

- Margaret St. Clair, Agent of the Unknown (1952)

Days went by, days in which time was as smooth as velvet, as smooth as cream, as smooth as glass.

- Margaret St. Clair, Agent of the Unknown (1952)

Time is the funniest thing, sir. It ties a man in knots.

- Clifford D. Simak, Time and Again, revised (1952)

The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1954)

That was the loathsome thing. The molasses of time: it couldn't be hurried. On it dragged, with weary, elephantine steps. Nothing could urge it faster: it was monstrous and deaf.

- Philip K. Dick, TheWorld Jones Made (1956)

It marked the beginning of the giant's surrender to that all-demanding system of time in which the rest of humanity finds itself, and of which, like the million twisted ripples of a fragmented whirlpool, our finite lives are the concluding products.

- J. G. Ballard, ''The Drowned Giant'' (1965)

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight.

- Harlan Ellison, '''Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman'' (1965)

Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees. Down with the Ticktockman!

- Harlan Ellison, '''Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman'' (1965)

In grasping the present, he felt for the first time the massive steadiness of time's movement everywhere complicated by shifting currents, waves, surges, and countersurges, like surf against rocky cliffs.

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

His vessel found itself between two vortices of gravitation called Bakhrida and Scintilla; Bakhrida speeds up time, Scintilla on the other hand slows it down, and between them lies a zone of stagnation, in which the present, becalmed, flows neither backward nor forward. There Heptodius froze alive, and remains to this day, along with the countless frigates and galleons of other astromariners, pirates, and spaceswashers, not aging in the least, suspended in the silence and excruciating boredom that is Eternity.

- Stanislaw Lem, ''How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface'' (1965), translated by Michael Kandel (1977)

He was independent of the enemy that, more than Death, menaced contemporary man: Time.

- BrianW. Aldiss, ''Man in His Time'' (1966)

I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)

''This,'' said Timnath Obregon, ''is the device I have invented to edit time.''

- Edward Bryant, ''Jade Blue'' (1971)

You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition.

- Robert Silverberg, ''Breckenridge and the Continuum'' (1973)

If the passage of time is a feature of human consciousness, past and future are functions of the mind.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

We exist in time. Time is what binds molecules to make your brown eyes, your yellow hair, your thick fingers. Time changes the structures, alters hair or fingers, dims the eyes, immutably mutating reality. Time, itself unchanging, is the cosmic glue, the universal antisolvent that holds our worlds together.

- Marta Randall, ''Secret Rider'' (1976)

Time is no longer a line along which history, past or future, lies neatly arranged, but a field of great mystery and complexity, in the contemplation of which the mind perceives an immense terror, and an indestructible hope.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, introduction to Nebula Award Stories Eleven (1977)

Time is both longer and shorter than you think, and usually all at once.

- Joan D. Vinge, ''View from a Height'' (1978)

Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea.

- Gregory Benford, Timescape (1980)

All day again and again. All moanday, tearsday, wailsday in one. A paring from the fingernail of time.

- IanWatson, ''The Bloomsday Revolution'' (1984)

In some certain important sense, time is not real.

- Philip K. Dick, ''How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later'' (1985)

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Time devours everything. Entire histories vanish.What matters is endurance. The spirit survives and goes onward when the palaces crumble and the kings are forgotten.

- Robert Silverberg, Letters from Atlantis (1990)

''No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.'' ''Lemons?'' ''If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon, what do I have left?'' ''Huh?'' ''Okay, so you think that time flows that way, do you?''

- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992)

The past and future clasp each other like knots of the same web: Tear one strand between two, but countless others still hold.

- Joan Slonczewski, Daughter of Elysium (1993)

Time travels us. Uses us as its road, going on never stopping always in one direction. No exits off this freeway.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Ether, OR'' (1995)

Her mother's perception of time differed from her own in radical and mysterious ways. Not just in the way that a month, to Chia's mother, was not a very long time, but in the way that her mother's ''now'' was such a narrow and literal thing. News-governed, Chia believed. Cable-fed. A present honed to whatever very instant of a helicopter traffic report.

- William Gibson, Idoru (1996)

Something had gone crack in the world when the playscreen broke. [. . .] Time and history would all be crazed now, like broken windows.

- Nalo Hopkinson, ''Under Glass'' (2001)