Chronological Quotes & Sayings

Rather, it provided a literary framework within which the author could effectively express the Hebraic conviction that one God created the world by bringing order out of chaos. He was interested in thematic rather than chronological organization. The — Gregory A. Boyd

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history. — Honore De Balzac

How old is the sun? Sun not temporary, not chronological. There is the terra-celestial and the celestial. I am celestial, mon. I am here, there and everywhere. I live among men so I must adjust myself. When I go to other planet, I must adjust myself there, too, mon. — Peter Tosh

Meltdown: noun, def. 1) adult tantrum 2) regressing to the chronological age of three 3) having no ability to express oneself rationally or make a logical case for oneself 4) believing that one's sense of self is compromised or in great danger 5) resorting to slash and burn tactics to try to get needs met Synonym: fit, bad temper, eruption, hysteria Antonym: calm, mature, reasonable, thoughtful — Crystal Ponti

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price. — Alexander Herzen

History is man's best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order. — Robert Breault

We encourage our coached athletes to write out a chronological list of activities, with exactly what they plan to do and when they plan to do it, over the final forty-eight to seventy-two hours before their big race. Actually write out a detailed schedule of when you will be traveling, when and where you will eat, when you will sleep, when you plan to visit registration, when you plan to organize your race equipment, when you plan to do your last couple of training sessions, and all of the other little activities you need to efficiently complete, right up until the time you enter the water on the morning of your race. — Don Fink

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses. — Isabel Allende

I express preference for a chronological sequence of events which precludes a violence. — Terry Pratchett

I don't believe in a chronological way of doing things. — Yoko Ono

What sustains and gives continuity to the fear of the past and also to the fear for the future? Surely it is thought - thought of what one has done in the past, or of how a particular disease has given pain and one is afraid of the future repetition of that pain. Fear is sustained by memory, by thinking about it.
Thought, in thinking about past pain or pleasure, gives a continuity to it, sustains and nourishes it. Pleasure or pain in relation to the future is the activity of thought. I am afraid of something I have done, its possible consequences in the future. This fear is sustained by thought. That is fairly obvious. So thought is time - psychologically. Thought brings about psychological time as distinct from chronological time. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag. — Edouard Leve

I'm a character actor - always have been, always will be - and historically, character actors don't come into their own until later in their professional and chronological lives. — Annie Potts

Do you know what time is? Not by a watch, not chronological time, buy psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. An idea is for self protection obviously; it is the idea of being secure. Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to and idea which we hope will give us certain safety. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

This was a cruel trick of the mind, yes, but Teddy had long ago accepted the logic of it - waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. What — Dennis Lehane

Do not breathing in the chronological, do not dream of the later, drain the intellect on the bring about twinkling. — Gautama Buddha

I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I'd feel compelled to organise the books in some regimented system - Dewey or alphabetical or worse - and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.
Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser's case I think I was focused mainly on his name): George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copperfield, she might seduce him). — Rebecca Makkai

We've got an entire lifetime ahead of us to do things like get married. But sometimes things in people's lives don't happen in chronological order like they should. Especially in our lives. Our chronological order got mixed up a long time ago. — Colleen Hoover

The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11 is actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronological problems thereby entailed. — Henry M. Morris

Life is an eternal instant.
Chronological time does not exist. — Samael Aun Weor

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts. — Shirley Jackson

Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present. — Dennis Lehane

If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable. — Criss Jami

Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action - what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired - as opposed to the human experience of having done those things. — Story Musgrave

Theatre is organic, film is not. Theatre you come every day and you work with a group of people and you're are all up for it and you all get to do the whole thing every night, be it two hours or three hours. In film you work in two or three minute bits and it's never in chronological order and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance. — Kevin Spacey

(As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.) — John Irving

A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family. — Saul Alinsky

But BEing time is never wasted time. When we are BEing, not only are we collaborating with chronological time, but we are touching on kairos, and are freed from the normal restrictions of time. — Madeleine L'Engle

I think, even a lot of people that make movies forget is that, in my mind, a movie should work with the sound off. You should be able to watch a movie without the sound and understand what's going on. That's your job, to build a series of chronological images that tell the story. — Channing Tatum

Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological. — Roger Ebert

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. — Theodor Adorno

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. — C.S. Lewis

Probably my two biggest musical influences were the Everly Brothers and the Beatles, in chronological order. Both of them have had a very simple-sounding musical style that's actually quite complex as far as popular songs are concerned. — Arlo Guthrie

expresses how the Creator solves the problems he needs to solve in order to bring creation out of chaos. Therefore, we have every reason to suppose that the succession of days was not meant to refer to a chronological succession but to a logical, thematic, and literary succession. In — Gregory A. Boyd

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem. — Billy Collins

Sometimes life doesn't happen in chronological order. — Colleen Hoover

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. — John Piper

The central concern of Egyptian art, literature, and architecture was the divine world order
the pharaoh and the gods, who were essentially one and the same. To the Egyptians, that divine order was eternal and unchanging, but it did not rest on a coherent and defined system of belief. The same god might be seen one time as the sky, another time as a bird; he might have a mythical mother, yet it might be said that he gave birth to himself; the sky could be both a cow and a goddess. The Egyptians did not think in chronological or logical terms but pictured the same phenomenon in a number of different ways. — Norman F. Cantor

I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties. — Paul Merton

All my other movies have the same process. Same approach. Same amount of changes. Everything. Things being made up on the fly. Changing things around. Firing and recasting. Constantly, constantly, in chronological sequence, not really knowing how this is going to end up. That is the only dogmatic approach I take towards everything. — Nicolas Winding Refn

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [ ... ]
My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. — Wallace Stegner

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time. — Ezra Pound

I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past. — J. Rufus Fears

My archive project is a multiedged sword. It is something I love doing, but it raises some questions about my motives in doing it. A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don't believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It's my life, and I am a collector. I collect everything: cars, trains, manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, records, memories and clothes, to name a few. The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years. — Neil Young

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. — Wallace Stegner

'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself. — Peter Ackroyd

Chronological living is a kind of lie. That's why I don't do it anymore. Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. — Charles Yu

The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological - as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pendragon. The — Charles C. Mann

In the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced. — Jules Verne

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C — Kurt Vonnegut

What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter. — Stephane Audeguy

In childhood, we yearn to be grown-ups. In old age, we yearn to be kids. It just seems that all would be wonderful if we didn't have to celebrate our birthdays in chronological order. — Robert Breault

Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it. — Marilynne Robinson

One of the most useful parts of my education as a writer was the practice of reading a writer straight through - every book the writer published, in chronological order, to see how the writer changed over time, and to see how the writer's idea of his or her project changed over time, and to see all the writer tried and accomplished or failed to accomplish. — Kyle Minor

The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at odds with fabricated conventions. Human beings do not grow in perfect symmetry. They oscillate, expand, contract, backtrack, arrest themselves, retrogress, mobilize, atrophy in part, proceed erratically according to experience and traumas. Some aspects of the personality mature, others do not. Some live in the past, some in the present. Some people are futuristic characters, some are cubistic, some are hard-edged, some geometric, some abstract, some impressionistic, some surrealistic! — Anais Nin

Obviously, a lot of TV shows are based on chronological episode viewing, and the stories are contingent upon watching it in order. Syndicated shows, you don't have to watch in order. You're just watching characters that don't change that much. — Cary Fukunaga

Time is the chronological breakdown of life — Sunday Adelaja

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation. — Criss Jami

Historical chronology, human or geological, depends ... upon comparable impersonal principles. If one scribes with a stylus on a plate of wet clay two marks, the second crossing the first, another person on examining these marks can tell unambiguously which was made first and which second, because the latter event irreversibly disturbs its predecessor. In virtue of the fact that most of the rocks of the earth contain imprints of a succession of such irreversible events, an unambiguous working out of the chronological sequence of these events becomes possible. — M. King Hubbert

A circular plot structure, often seen in adventure novels and quest fantasies, is a narrative devise involving setting, character, and theme. Typically a protagonist ventures from home (or the starting place of the story), goes on a journey, often a dangerous one in which many challenges are overcome, and then returns home a changed person. The plot is usually chronological, with the events occurring in a setting that becomes a circle. By returning the character to the place where he started, the author can emphasize the character's growth or change while also highlighting the theme of the story. — Carl M. Tomlinson

It's a bitch on this ship, isn't it?' That got an unexpected smile out of the symp. Musey had two dimples on his cheeks that made him look about half his chronological age. — Karin Lowachee

Jamie: Maybe you could stop being a neat freak and ease off with barking orders at me.
Dante: I resent the neat-freak statement. And I do not bark.
Jamie: Sure you don't, Popeye.
Dante: And it wouldn't kill you to use the shoe rack. I mean, it's right by the door.
Jamie: Stop putting my CD's in chronological order, and I'll work on the shoe rock thing.
Dante: How about alphabetical order?
Jamie: How about you go to therapy? — Suzanne Wrightt

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them. — Spike Jonze

Time has to be converted, then, from chronos, mere chronological time, to kairos, a New Testament Greek word that has to do with opportunity, with moments that seem ripe for their intended purpose. Then, even while life continues to seem harried, while it continues to have hard moments, we say, "Something good is happening amid all this." We get glimpses of how God might be working out his purposes in our days. Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God's work with us. Whatever happens - good things or bad, pleasant or problematic - we look and ask, "What might God be doing here?" We see the events of the day as continuing occasions to change the heart. Time points to Another and begins to speak to us of God. We — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life. — Maya Lin

I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest ... Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately ... — Ken Kesey

I have arranged the passages that I have chosen for reflection in roughly chronological order. The book of Jeremiah is not itself arranged chronologically, and there is far more in it than biography. That means that readers not infrequently puzzle over transitions and wrestle to find the appropriate settings for the sayings. I have not attempted to sort out these puzzles or explain the difficulties. — Eugene H. Peterson

So my hope, each day as I grow older, is that this will never be simply chronological aging ... but that I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously - to be, in fact, a true adult.
To be. — Madeleine L'Engle

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture. — Italo Calvino

Usually I like to make my movies from start to finish in chronological order. As a filmmaker it lets me be able to direct my actors and tell them where exactly they are and go with progression. — Paul Walker

I like a boyish quality in a man, somebody who is still adventurous. But I have no rules. I do not care - within reason - about your chronological age. I care whether you have passion in your life. — Mary Frann

Will wolfed down his sandwich, drank half his water, and went to work examining the boxes. He discovered that all of them had dates scrawled on the side, so he cranked up to his highest speed, motored around the room rearranging them, and had them neatly arranged in chronological order in less than twenty minutes. Three equal rows, forty boxes in each, lined up in the center of the room. Some were sealed; most were open. Their weight varied greatly; some were packed solid and heavy with books and ledgers, while others contained nothing but rolled-up maps. — Mark Frost

In short, chronological connectivity puts us in touch with the holy. It is at once humbling and exhilarating. I say this as someone who has never followed any formal religious practice. Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that charms us in the direction of sanity and grace. — James Howard Kunstler

writes Madeleine L'Engle, "in kairos we are completely un-self-conscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches for chronological time."10 — Sarah Arthur

My books are written with a strong chronological spine. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though. — Douglas Adams

Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shoot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing. Walden contains material from the years 1964-1968 strung together in chronological order. — Jonas Mekas

Time doesn't necessarily happen in chronological order. — Douglas Adams

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed. — Howard Moss

You know, there's chronological age, there's biological age, and there's psychological age. Chronological age, there's nothing you can do about, which is I'm 52. You set that number aside. — Cheryl Tiegs

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. — Daniel J. Boorstin

She was only forty-seven according to the file his aide had put together for him, but had gone totally gray by thirty-two. That early sign of aging was a genetic family trait that hadn't been bred out, likely because it gave the possessors a regal appearance, regardless of their chronological age. — Nalini Singh

Of course, when you remember your life, you never remember anything in a chronological way. You always have pieces of memories, and some of these memories are full of details and very colorful. Some of them you just see the action and it's completely blank. — Marjane Satrapi

I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins. — Jill McCorkle

That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence. — Tom Robbins

Chronological age is only an approximation of your functional age. — Marv Levy

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility ... youth's characteristic chronological snobbery. — C.S. Lewis

For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely. — Eudora Welty

My favorite thing in moviemaking is to shoot in chronological order if at all possible, because it just helps for continuity and all the logistical purposes. It also helps with performance and the journey of each character, but I also think it's good for the director and everyone [else] involved. — Zoe Bell

What do people think of when they talk about their lives? Do they really see them as an integral whole, as a chronological sequence of events; as something logical, purposeful, completed? What moments do they remember, and how do they remember them? As words? As a series of images and sounds? My life crumbles into a series of pictures, unconnected scenes which comes to mind only occassionally and at random. But there are key events, the acts of chance or fate, which later enable me to construct a logical whole of my life. One such moment was meeting Jose. The other was my decision to see our love through to the very end. — Slavenka Drakulic

Our minds aren't bound by a chronological corset. When thinking and dreaming, past, present and future are mixed up. That's also possible for a writer. — Gunter Grass

And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, wiht a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. - Sal Paradise — Jack Kerouac

Different ideas will capture my imagination and ask if they can be in a story. Sometimes they fit together and sometimes they don't. One notion leads to another and I might write pages that will have to go away later, but I'm sketching, getting to know a character, how he or she speaks or lives, so I just let it flow. Things start to click. I don't outline before starting, nor do I write one chapter at a time or even in chronological order. If I'm thinking about a scene, conversation, or event that will come later, I page down and write away. — Lisa Preston

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off - though their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be - but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and being to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
I too appear as something of a stranger in these early memories. — Donna Tartt

Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will. — Alister E. McGrath

Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time. — Joshua Foer

Malachi Smith. Crispin Jones. Suzette Boudrot. Claude Le Breton." Matthew paused as Ransome searched the ledger's entries for the names. "You should have kept them in chronological order instead of alphabetical. That's how I remember them." Ransome — Deborah Harkness

The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original system of theology. — Thomas Paine

A blog is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent 'post' (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom. — Darren Rowse

Sometimes life gets in your way.
it gets all up in your damn way.
But it doesn't get all up in your damn way
because it wants you to just give up and let it take control.
Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along.
Life wants you to fight it
Learn how to make it your own.
it wants you to grab and axe and hack through the wood.
It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through concrete.
It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it.
Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together,
stir it up,
blend it. — Colleen Hoover