top of page
Exlpore more Time quotes

"Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time."

"The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation."

"Today and now I hate this words they sound horrible, sound powerful and you just get more older and more older. I just said them when I was 9, now I'm 16 soon I will be 17. And again I use them "now" and "today" you can also say "no" but it's now 18:07 after five blinks with the eyes it just becomes 18:08, I hate today. Everyone uses it, but it's for two different places I also use today, for me is 4.10.2016, but for you this is past, and your today is 4.10.2026..."

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

"Here hath been dawning another blue day: think wilt thou let it slip useless away?"

"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible."
Explore more quotes by Alice Munro

"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."

"I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me."

"Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story."

"In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it."

"In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward."

"The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal."

"Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories."

"The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home."

"I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window."
bottom of page