First Time Travel Quotes & Sayings

Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of light. That's why dead painters shine so bright. — Marlene Dumas

There is a whole generation of young people just like us wandering around Europe and the rest of the world, trying to find some meaning for why they are alive and what they should choose to do with their time. When Martha leaves and we sit in front of the fire in the living room, I look to Lily until she turns to me and I can see the grief that hides just under the surface of her expression. We are, or at least were, two of those lost souls: wanderers, backpackers, season workers, Wwoofers, Workawayers, travellers: searching the world for something or someplace to hold on to. And we have come home not because we have retired from trying to find answers and are ready to settle into adulthood, but because my death has come upon us fast and unexpected. I am not the first person of this generation of travellers- or any person who lives in this godless, superficial society- to die. But I think that it feels to Lily and to me, my mother too perhaps, that I may very well be. — Annie Fisher

Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be. — Anthony Bourdain

You don't know about the other travellers you meet and they in turn have no idea who you are, and that is truly special, for there isn't any detrimental preconceived notions about the other, and in this space there is room for understanding and healing. When you backpack, for the first time in a long time, you feel like you belong and are connected to not only with the world, but also with your inner self. — Forrest Curran

First, to create the violent distortions of space and time necessary to travel through a wormhole, one would need fabulous amounts of positive and negative matter, on the order of a huge star or a black hole. Matthew Visser, a physicist at Washington University, estimates that the amount of negative energy you would need to open up a 1-meter wormhole is comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would need to be negative. He says, "You need about minus one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future. — Michio Kaku

I mean, the first 'Back to the Future' is kind of a perfect script, I think, in terms of handling time travel the best. It depends on your definition. To me, that means it effectively uses it in the story. — Rian Johnson

People from the military have been inside that thing. If I went back in time, I wouldn't necessarily be thinking geopolitically, but maybe they would. That has to be half the reason why they're funding us in the first place. Maybe there were earlier versions of history where Republicans didn't vote to pulp all those Andrew Jackson twenties and replace them with bills that had portraits of Reagan. Maybe in the first version of post-Point Zero history, insurgents in North and South Dakota didn't attempt to secede; maybe we weren't fighting enemies both here and in the Middle East. Or maybe there was a full-on civil war going on in the United States and the current state of affairs is an improvement. We don't know. We can't know. And we can't know the extent to which any of us, sitting here at this table, is responsible. — Dexter Palmer

When people ask about relationships, they always say, "How did you guys meet?" Not, "OMG, tell me about your third year! And when a relationship is in trouble, the desperate couple is always trying to recapture the magic of when they first met. The real tragedy is that, without time travel or amnesia, it's impossible to ever get back there. Which is why to most people, marriage is about as magical as watching David Copperfield make Claudia Schiffer disappear. — Shane Kuhn

My first thought was that a tornado had somehow picked me up and carried me off, like in the Wizard of Oz. No old witches pedaled by, and I didn't see any flying farm animals or chicken coops, and after a few agonizing minutes, I fell deep into unconsciousness again. — J.R. Rain

And so I played, and they held their breath, as they heard the beauty of the music, so like a human voice, yet so beyond it. I drew the bow across the strings. The first notes of the Bach Sarabande sounded in the room and I felt the sound waves travel through me, through the body and guts of my cello, through the endpin and into the wood of the floorboards and through the feet of the audience and up through their skeletons to their hearts and into their brains and the music reached their brains and their hearts at the same time - for sound travels according to the laws of physics, and I saw the light behind their eyes catch fire and heard them intake breath as they felt the rush of the music take over their bodies, aethereal and corporeal combined. — Tracy Farr

Midway through my treatments, I was at the White House to do an interview with President Bush's press secretary, Tony Snow. He had recently revealed he was facing cancer for a second time. While there I was told that the First Lady, Laura Bush, wanted to see me in the private residence for tea. Mrs. Bush has a family history of breast cancer. She personally invited me to accompany her on a portion of an international breast cancer initiative with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and I couldn't pass up this opportunity. My doctors cleared me to travel - although getting my mom's blessing was far more difficult. Remember, I was in the middle of chemo treatments. I spent time with Mrs. Bush in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, in the UAE and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I met some incredible women on the trip. — Robin Roberts

Time travel is awesome ... And useful. That sentence had a typo when I typed it ... The first time. — Craig Benzine

Fitness is very important to me because it helps give me a routine when I travel. It gives me one hour of 'me' time and passes the time when I'm lonely. Living with scoliosis serves as a constant reminder to keep my core and back strong. If I get lazy, I feel it in my back first. — Martha Hunt

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted. — Bill Bryson

To travel a circle is to journey over the same ground time and time again. To travel a circle wisely is to journey over the same ground for the first time. In this way, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the circle, a path to where you wish to be. And when you notice at last that the path has circled back into itself, you realize that where you wish to be is where you have already been ... and always were. — Neale Donald Walsch

It was a fine feeling indeed to be standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one's face. And I believe it was then, looking on that view, that I began for the first time to adopt a frame of mind appropriate for the journey before me. For it was then that I felt the first healthy flush of anticipation for the many interesting experiences I know these days ahead hold in store for me. — Kazuo Ishiguro

My first clue time travel could be possible was in the barber's chair the day before my girlfriend's funeral. — Timothy C. Ward

To visit a new country for the first time is great fun; but it is even greater fun to introduce somebody else to a country that you know. — Jan Struther

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. — Carl Sagan

I think I live inside the plane! I never have time to unpack; I'm always leaving in two days again. I travel a lot, and at the beginning it was really fun. The first time I went inside a plane, I was 15 years old and I had so much fun. I like to travel all over the world and learn [about] new cultures. Not that many people have the opportunity to do that. — Adriana Lima

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page. — Kiese Laymon

My first full year of touring, I did 300 days on the road. That was not including the travel time or publicity or anything else - that was just dates. I was home probably less than 50 days that year. — Josh Turner

I cannot wait to get up there and experience space travel for the first time. It will be a dream come true. — David Mackay

I would love to have some sort of 'Back To The Future' Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid. — Questlove

I remember the first time I felt that I was sharing the stage with someone spectacular was dancing with Beyonce. It was the dancers, the band, Beyonce and me in front of thousands of people. That was sick. It was pretty amazing that I got to travel the world with someone like her. — Harry Shum Jr.

It's a great time to book vacation travel for the winter, .. After the first of the year, airplanes are empty, resorts are empty, and they are very excited to get early bookings. — Terry Jones

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant. — Victor Hugo

The worst thing that happened to air travel in the past ten years was the bankruptcy of Xhibit Corp., the parent company of SkyMall. I recalled with clarity the first time I boarded a flight and it was missing from all usual nooks and crannies. It had been a dark day. — L. H. Cosway

You couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around.
This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets ... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.'
And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice.
Wish granted. Now what? — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!"). — Amy Smith

As her breath caught in her throat, Vanessa grabbed the first diversion she spotted - a glossy visitor's guide to the city - and sat down, determined not to let her thoughts travel back in time. But as she flipped through the pages without seeing them, her determination failed, and a flood of memories poured over her. Tears began slipping down her cheeks, one by one, until she started sobbing, and the guide slipped to the floor. — Elsie Hillman-Gordon

Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which ... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be? — Mark Thompson

And now I have a big house, nice clothes and I travel in first class and I love it, so maybe it's time to enjoy being a star. — Vincent Cassel

After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people. — Ernesto Che Guevara

Dad reckons if you have a great time in one place, then that's a good reason for never going back. Nothing will ever measure up to the first time. He laughs at people who go to the same place every year, same beach, same house, same things to do. — James Moloney

It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one. — Mohsin Hamid

Someone said that thirty was a significant birthday, and everyone around the table agreed. Someone else said it was the first time you heard the bell.
What bell? someone asked.
But they all knew what bell. It was like you'd already completed a few laps, observed another, but this was the first time you'd properly heard the bell. There had been one at seven, but you hadn't heard it because you were so young; and then one at fourteen but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy looking over your shoulder; then another at twenty-one but you hadn't heard it because you were too busy talking; and then one at twenty-eight which for some reason took two years before you heard it. But they all agreed you did hear that one, eventually.
Your lousy career, said one guest. Babies, said one of the women. Lovers, friends, travel, said another. Parents aging. Bong. All the things you hadn't done. Might not do. Bong. — Graham Joyce

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. — Douglas Adams

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. - DAVE BARRY — Timothy Ferriss

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered. — V.S. Naipaul

The scientific method entails two assumptions that are so basic that, even if you spell them out, they are still difficult to keep in mind. First: that the observer stays the same while the world changes. Second: that cause precedes effect.

But the very nature of the experiment we are conducting means that the second of these assumptions is thrown into doubt. We are deliberately attempting to engineer an event in which effect chronologically precedes cause.

If one of these assumptions is under threat, why not the other? — Dexter Palmer

The reason why people wear pajamas to the airport in the first place is so that they'll be comfortable during their flight. But you know, typically, air travel is 50 to 75 percent of the time you spend traveling. The rest of the time you spend in public places like airports and around other people. That's when looking good trumps comfort. — Casey Neistat

As she stared at the ceiling that first night
her body softly falling back into itself,
she thought of how we dream of journeying
on spaceships to other universes, other worlds,
but really, for the forever,
we're stuck here on the dirt and
the only time we will travel anywhere truly unknowable
is when we slip into the skin of another,
venturing into their mysteries,
always hoping for
a safe landing. — Toby Barlow

Austin - it's a stimulating center. In this conversation, the very first two questions were talking about my kind of wanderlust and my adventures. Some people at my time in life travel forever. I don't know whether it's the British or the Australians - whoever it is, you can kind of stagger into some sort of far-off bastion in the middle of nowhere, and you'll find someone from Britain or someone from Australia or maybe an American. — Robert Plant

The first thing we should do in order to grasp the realm of time travel is by redefining
general perception and common concepts regarding time within our daily language structure. — Toba Beta

All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows. — Nikos Kazantzakis

When historians look back on our century, they may remember it most, not for space travel or the release of nuclear energy, but as the time when the peoples of the world first came to take one another seriously. — Huston Smith

Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day. — Jasper Fforde

Beware, lion's lady, for your predator is hungry tonight. He may not wait long before devouring you." "Devouring me?" she asked, challenge gleaming in her eyes. "What if I devour him first? — Shelly Thacker

I was very fortunate to grow up with parents who love to travel, so I traveled from a young age. My dad's a heart surgeon and goes to conferences all over the world. By the time I was seven, I traveled outside the country for the first time. We went to Paris. The next year, we went to London, and then Brussels. — Candice Accola

All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time. — Paul Fussell

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time. — Rebecca Solnit

First of all, time travel per se does not exist. 'Travel' implies that you choose both your destination and when you come back. It's more a 'time shot,' a 'time through.' But it's definitely not time travel. — Francis Barel

For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you're conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule. — Rolf Potts

The first time probably people really were aware of me, I unfortunately had the title of Showtime's Funniest Person in America. And that's a really tough title to travel around with when you're not even known. — Ellen DeGeneres

Sometimes I wonder if, having the ability to time travel back to certain moments in which our fear or impulsiveness got the best of us and resulted in an unsatisfying outcome, we would actually alter our behavior knowing what we know now, or if we would end up repeating exactly what we did the first time, surrendering to those elemental directives, incapable of deviating from some preordained essence of our character. — Teddy Wayne

Probably the first time I left Italy was to travel by train to Lourdes. I went with my mother and my grandmother - who was a very religious person - so it was a pilgrimage of sorts. I remember it as a very intense, but beautiful experience. — Andrea Bocelli

And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) 'no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony ... it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time ... Yay, for this, more aloneness — Jack Kerouac

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Inch by inch it's all a cinch, by the yard it's hard. Go for it
no matter how slow or long the process seems at first. — Mardi Ballou

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon
millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. — Kurt Vonnegut

When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation ... — Janet Frame

No one should be required to see America for the first time. — Ashley Montagu

If I could time travel into the future, my first port of call would be the point where medical technology is at its best because, like most people on this planet, I have this aversion to dying. — Neal Asher

I just travel all the time. And I was just looking at the schedules now and starting the first week of October I will be every weekend with somebody at tournaments through Christmas. So it gets very difficult to just go away and not do that. — Ivan Lendl

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, 'It happened overnight.' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing. — Colson Whitehead

My family went to Toronto to visit relatives when I was 13 or 14. It was the first time we had ever been abroad. This was the early Eighties, and I remember the impossible glamour of air travel - my mum spending days trying to decide what she was going to wear on the plane. — John Niven