Orhan Pamuk Quotes

I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day.

I've been on a calendar, but I've never been on time.

I'm the kind of guy who, I need a watch that tells me what day it is. I need to know it's Friday on my watch. I need to look at it and go, 'Friday today.' Tomorrow I will not know it's Saturday until I look at my watch. My watchband broke, I was crippled. I have no concept of time, I have no concept of dates.

Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real.

Every white man seemed to have a great concern about time. We enjoyed time, they measured it…. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we never thought of them.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

We parcel up time into years and months and days because without compartmentalisation the tundra of time is impossible to navigate.

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

The test is the sixty seconds of every minute, and the sixty minutes of every hour, not our times of prayer and devotional meetings.

Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.

Time is the measurable unit of movement concerning a before and an after.

Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.

What Time Is It? You Mean Now?

God has a thousand-year calendar with only one day marked on it. It is marked “TODAY”.

The calendar and the mirror - they're bastards.

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.

I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.

What is life but playing with time?

...It's just one hour. Just one little hour. What could happen in one hour?

I am working never to be late again.

If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?

We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.

For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.