Time travel - 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!

''Upon that machine,'' said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, ''I intend to explore time.''

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

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs.Watchett came in, and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.

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

''Think of the opportunities a time machine offers a newspaper. The other papers can tell them what has happened and what is happening, but, by Godfrey, they'll have to read the Globe to know what is going to happen.'' ''I have a slogan for you,'' I said. '''Read the News Before It Happens.' ''

- Clifford D. Simak, ''Sunspot Purge'' (1940)

''Time travel,'' Karestly said, ''is the best therapy known today.''

- Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, ''The Cure'' (1946)

I left her at her dad's time machine playfully thrusting the universe a million years into the future.

- Howard Schoenfeld, ''Built Up Logically'' (1949)

The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

- Ray Bradbury, ''A Sound of Thunder'' (1952)

So we say good-by to the colorful, romantic twentieth century with its many tribes, its primitive peoples and its quaint customs.

- Wilson Tucker, ''The Tourist Trade'' (1953)

''You can't possibly create a paradox in time, don't you see, because anything you do in the past must have been done already or you couldn't have been there to do it in the first place.'' ''You're quite right. [. . .] What is to bewill be, since it already was.''

- Roger Dee, ''The Poundstone Paradox'' (1954)

He jaunted up the geodesic lines of space-time to an Elsewhere and an Elsewhen. He arrived in chaos. He hung in a precarious para-Now for a moment and then tumbled back into chaos.

- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1956)

Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.

- Robert A. Heinlein, '' 'All You Zombies - ''' (1959)

He swung dizzily along the line of time, as he had done so often before. He saw himself, here and here, and saw others, shadow-figures, dream-figures, lurking behind the curtains of time.

- Robert Silverberg, ''Open the Sky'' (1966)

In the thirty-eighth year of his life, a man traveling back from a time when the calendar said he would have been ninety-five died a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

- D. G. Compton, Chronocules (1970)

The present, as every schoolboy knows, is only the surface of the space-time sea, and a living spacewhale can dive beneath this surface and sojourn in times past, can return, if it so desires, to the primordial moment when the cosmos was born.

- Robert F. Young, ''Starscape with Frieze of Dreams'' (1970)

Whenever he is, he is not when he was. The time-booth works.

- Andrew J. Offutt, ''My Country, Right orWrong'' (1971)

All ''nows'' are equal; that is the basic theorem of time travel.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

It's just a jump to the left And then a step to the right With your hands on your hips You bring your knees in tight But it's the pelvic thrust That really drives you insane Let's do the TimeWarp again - Richard O'Brien, ''TimeWarp,'' The Rocky Horror Show (play, 1973)

Humanity, not content with having the universe for a playground, delved into past and future, and lost itself amid the ages of the stars.

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

John Albion was/is/will be living/dying/dead; sucked into the dead/dying void. John Albion had been/is/will be sitting in the warmth of her home and talking of something very small, something very alien, something very much in his bones which has/is/will be killed/killing him. Conjugate the tenses of time travel.

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

The only workable time machine ever invented is the science-fiction story.

- Robert Silverberg, introduction to Trips in Time (1977)

Travelling in time is not like taking the tube, Mr. Bartholomew.

- ConnieWillis, ''FireWatch'' (1982)

The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn.

- ConnieWillis, ''FireWatch'' (1982)

I'm 20,000 years from home and there are times when it hurts more than I can stand.

- Robert Silverberg, ''House of Bones'' (1988)