Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness
Interpretation
Time can feel both expansive and constrictive, capturing moments that linger with us.
This quote reflects the elusive nature of time, suggesting that it can stretch to encompass moments of profound connection and meaning. It illustrates how certain experiences can feel timeless, where moments seem to last forever, even as we return to them in memory, capturing the essence of nostalgia and the human experience of time's flow.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of cherishing moments with loved ones, this quote can highlight how time shapes our relationships.
In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.
Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.
We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
Better to mock the game than to play and lose.
The kingdom of heaven is like electricity. You don't see it. It is within you.
wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
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