Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.

Alice: "How long is forever?" White Rabbit: "Sometimes, just one second."

The passage of time is simply an illusion created by our brains.

People always say life is short. I've never been convinced of that - mine seems to have a tendency to go on and on.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.

It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is

One's relationship to time is complicated, and sometimes a day will drag on forever and sometimes it'll be over in a flash. When you look back, "I'm old," after 40 or 60 years, I can't believe I'm as old as I am.

Time does not always pass at the same speed. We are the ones who determine that speed.

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

I have gone into yesterday and tomorrow and both were as real as today -- which is like the dreams of ghosts!

Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

Because time isn't something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.

It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

Forever - is composed of Nows - 'Tis not a different time... Let Months dissolve in further Months - And Years - exhale in Years.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

The problem with waiting for someone, whether that wait is an hour or a lifetime, is everyone's 'clock' is different. So what you might consider forever is only a little while to them, or vice versa.

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.