Christina Baker Kline Quotes

I was thinking about how disjointedly time seemed to flow, passing in a blur at times, with single images standing out more clearly than others. And then, at other times, every second was significant, etched in my mind.

I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it's a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.

As you get older what you think was 10 years ago was actually 15 years ago.

The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Time passes so slowly if you are unaware of it and so quickly if you are aware of it.

I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.

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

Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesn't go in the order we perceive it. There are... repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

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.

It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

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

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

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.

Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

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

Nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.

The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun.

Two seconds are a thousand years.

Time is an illusion that makes us all pant.