Book Quotes · Reading Lists · Notes on Art and Music · Editorial Policy
Two antique gold pocket watches resting on an old leather book

Book Quotes About Time

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

The best book quotes about time are rarely about clocks. They are about the hour that has already gone, the one that will not come, and the one a character refuses to let move. Below are twelve lines, from Ecclesiastes and Saint Augustine to Miss Havisham, Proust’s madeleine and the last sentence of The Great Gatsby, each copied from the full public-domain text and cited to its chapter, book or scene.

They fall into three rough groups: writers trying to define time, characters trying to stop it, and narrators trying to get it back. The third group is the most crowded.

Book quotes about time: what it is

1. A season for everything

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

Advertisement

Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version

The verse that follows pairs a time to be born with a time to die, and the list runs on in matched opposites. It reads as comfort, but the book around it is one of the bleakest in the Bible. Later in the same chapter the Preacher says a man has no preeminence above a beast, for all is vanity, and the season verse starts to look less like a promise than a shrug at how little anyone controls.

2. Augustine’s confession

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not

Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book XI (E. B. Pusey translation)

The most honest sentence ever written about time, and the start of a long argument rather than the end of one. Augustine goes on to reason that the past exists only as memory and the future only as expectation, so that all three times live in the present mind. Every novelist below is, in a sense, dramatising his point.

3. The fourth dimension

There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, chapter I

The Time Traveller is explaining his theory to sceptical dinner guests by the fire, and Wells makes the scene deliberately comfortable: a bright fire, bubbles in the glasses, chairs of the host’s own patent. The guests object that you cannot move about in time, and he answers that our consciousness already moves along it, only in one direction. The machine comes later; the argument is the hook.

4. The stream

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

Thoreau puts this near the end of the chapter, a page before the one on reading. The sentence is calmer than it looks: time is not a flood that carries him off, it is a stream shallow enough to see through. He then says he would rather fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars, which is either mystical or a very good joke about being bad at fishing.

Book quotes about time running out

5. Minutes and waves

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet LX

It is the sixtieth sonnet, and it is about minutes, a numerical coincidence that is hard to unsee once noticed. The waves do not crash; they toil, each one pushing the one ahead. The sonnet ends, as many in the sequence do, with the claim that my verse shall stand despite Time’s cruel hand.

6. Tomorrow, and tomorrow

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V

Macbeth has just been told that the Queen is dead, and his first response is She should have died hereafter. The speech is about time precisely because he has no more of it: a messenger enters seconds later to say Birnam Wood is moving. The verb is the cruelty. Tomorrow does not rush; it creeps.

7. The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, first edition, stanza LI

FitzGerald revised his Rubáiyát several times, and the Gutenberg text prints both the first and fifth editions. In the fifth, the stanza is LXXI and thy becomes your. It is one of the few English verses that has become a proverb almost word for word, and its point is brutal: what is done is written, and no amount of regret edits it.

Book quotes about stopped and lost time

8. Twenty minutes to nine

I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter VIII

Pip’s first visit to Satis House, and the repetition is the horror: not one stopped clock, but every one. The explanation comes fourteen chapters later, when Herbert tells Pip the jilted bride received the letter breaking off her marriage At the hour and minute, and stopped all the clocks. More Dickens is in our Charles Dickens quotes.

9. Proust on the past

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, “Overture” (C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation)

This comes just before the madeleine, and it is the theory the cake proves. Proust has been describing a Celtic belief that the souls of the dead are held captive in objects until someone happens to pass by. The past, he says, works the same way: you cannot think your way back to it, you can only stumble on it.

10. The madeleine

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, “Overture” (C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation)

The famous scene is mostly failure. The narrator tries the tea again and again, and the feeling weakens each time, until suddenly the memory returns: the taste is that of the crumb his aunt Léonie gave him on Sunday mornings at Combray. The whole of Combray, town and gardens alike, then sprang into being from his cup of tea. Before that, he admits, a second mouthful gave him nothing more than the first, and a third rather less.

11. Can’t repeat the past?

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, chapter VI

After the party Daisy did not enjoy, Gatsby walks up and down a path of fruit rinds and crushed flowers and tells Nick he will fix everything the way it was before. Nick’s line is common sense; Gatsby’s reply is the whole tragedy in four words. Fitzgerald then has him look round wildly, as if the past were hiding in the shadow of the house.

12. Borne back

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, chapter IX

The last line of the novel answers Gatsby’s boast from chapter VI. You can row as hard as you like; the current wins. The sentence before it ends on a dash, And one fine morning, as if Nick cannot bring himself to finish the hope.

Quick reference: time quotes by book

Quote fragment Book Chapter or section
a time to every purpose Ecclesiastes (KJV) 3:1
What then is time? Augustine, Confessions Book XI
a fourth, Time Wells, The Time Machine ch. I
the stream I go a-fishing in Thoreau, Walden “Where I Lived”
our minutes hasten to their end Shakespeare, Sonnets LX
Tomorrow, and tomorrow Shakespeare, Macbeth V.v
The Moving Finger writes FitzGerald, Rubáiyát 1st ed., LI
twenty minutes to nine Dickens, Great Expectations ch. VIII
a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it Proust, Swann’s Way Overture
a shudder ran through my whole body Proust, Swann’s Way Overture
Can’t repeat the past? Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ch. VI
borne back ceaselessly into the past Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ch. IX

Some of the strangest clocks in fiction are collected elsewhere on the site: the Hatter’s tea party stuck at six o’clock in Alice in Wonderland’s oddest lines, the clock-winding disaster that opens Tristram Shandy in the strangest sentences in classic literature, and Big Ben’s leaden circles in Virginia Woolf quotes.

If you read only one of these in full, try Confessions Book XI. It is short, and by the end of it Augustine has argued himself into wondering whether time is nothing else than protraction, and whether it is a stretching-out of the mind itself.

Sources

More to read

Looking for lines from modern novels? Browse Lucy’s own quote collection.

Owed money from a settlement? Check what is open at OpenClassActions.com. Caring for someone with dementia? Find practical guides at HelpDementia.com. Working out a skin routine? Evidence-based answers at AcneAdvocate.com. Forgot the name of a movie? Identify it at FindThisMovie.com. Was your data exposed? Track active breaches at DataBreachRadar.com.

We use cookies to run this site, measure how it’s used, and show ads. Choose “Essentials only” to limit cookies to what the site needs to work. Privacy Policy.