Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
~
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by
Thomas Hardy
"What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer—the Future so much brighter?"
~
Jane Eyre
by
Charlotte Bronte
"Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been and passed away and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man."
~
She
by
H. Rider Haggard
No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.
~
Dandelion Wine
by
Ray Bradbury
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
~
Middlemarch
by
George Eliot
Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past's mistakes and the future's fears.
~
The Big Time
by
Fritz Leiber
The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred.
~
Dune Messiah
by
Frank Herbert
Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.
~
A Dance with Dragons
by
George R. R. Martin
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
~
The Call of Cthulhu
by
H. P. Lovecraft
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
~
The Fellowship of the Ring
by
J. R. R. Tolkien