No Time For Being Second Quotes & Sayings

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but its instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends. — Adam Haslett

I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions. — Henri Matisse

The world is filled with people who lie to each other everyday. They lie about their own well-being, lie about time, lie about what they like and dislike, lie about the best moments they have had, lie to make money, lie to lose money, lie to kill others, lie to save others and lie about love every second of their life. This world is filled with liars. — Kambiz Shabankareh

I served in all commissioned ranks from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. — Smedley Butler

I hated being "Mrs." from the first second each time. I didn't know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt. I hated being one half of a couple, without understanding that it wasn't the husband or the man I hated, it was situation, the identity. — Vivian Gornick

It was well said - by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think - that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable. — Christopher Hitchens

It is one thing to be a man's wife - quite another to be the mother of his children. In fact, once you become a mother, being a wife seems like a game you once played or a self-help book you were overly impressed with as a teenager that on second reading is puffy with common ideas. This was one of the many things I had learned since crossing over into the middle place - that sliver of time when childhood and parenthood overlap. — Kelly Corrigan

I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. — Jane Austen

Christ, we've only been here for five minutes. It's like being stuck in the Tardis. Time has lost all meaning." He turned away to ditch his cocktail glass, thus missing Lainie's gobsmacked expression. A Doctor Who reference from her second-least-favorite person? Wonders never ceased. — Lucy Parker

The present: It is interesting that the "NOW" is called "the present." The present is the ultimate gift; it is the gift of truth and life. You are given the present every second, and you will receive it forever. The present is the only thing that exists, the only thing you are ever conscious of. Your life is a series of presents moving through time. The future does not exist until it becomes the present.

Life is one perpetual present.

Creation is happening now: Your body, mind, and the world around it are being created from microsecond to microsecond. Things may look the same, but they are not; everything is constantly changing and being recreated. Our life and our world is being created from moment to moment.

Life and everything in it is always new. — Michael Smith

I was an apprentice television engineer when I decided to pack it up and go full-time, much to my father's disgust. But I'm still interested and I like messing about with TV. I can't deny it ... TV engineering was the job I'd wanted at the time, and I got what I wanted. But in the long-term it would have been second best to being a musician. — Peter Ham

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. — Charlie Kaufman

And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve- the utter silence of non-rain. — Jaclyn Moriarty

People go on about the first time being important, but it's the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway. — Nick Hornby

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there's a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth. — Andrew Solomon

We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. We eat distasteful food, if we have nothing else, because we cannot do otherwise. A moderately greedy man looks out for delicacies, but he can easily do without them. If we have no air we are suffocated, we struggle to get it, not because we expect to get some advantage from it but because we need it. We go in search of sea air without being driven by any necessity, because we like it. In time it often comes about automatically that the second motive takes the place of the first. This is one of the great misfortunes of our race. A man spokes opium in order to attain to a special condition, which he thinks superior; often, as time goes on, the opium reduces him to a miserable condition which he feels to be degrading; but he is no longer able to do without it. — Simone Weil

LOVE'S BAPTISM. I'm ceded, I've stopped being theirs; The name they dropped upon my face With water, in the country church, Is finished using now, And they can put it with my dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools I've finished threading too. Baptized before without the choice, But this time consciously, of grace Unto supremest name, Called to my full, the crescent dropped, Existence's whole arc filled up With one small diadem. My second rank, too small the first, Crowned, crowing on my father's breast, A half unconscious queen; But this time, adequate, erect, With will to choose or to reject. And I choose - just a throne. — Emily Dickinson

Apathy.

The reason you may wake up one day being not only a 2nd class citizen, but a criminal because of who you are - and then wonder why 'somebody' didn't do something when there was still time? — Christina Engela

For a brief second, for an inexpressibly curtailed efflux of time, so short that its duration could be appreciated only in recollection, being immediately engulfed at the moment of birth, I was conscious of a sensation I had never before encountered: an awareness that Stringham was perhaps a trifle embarrassed. — Anthony Powell

On Wednesday, April 9, 1969, Bush, who was just beginning his second term as a congressman, flew to see the former president at LBJ's ranch at Stonewall, Texas, about 220 miles from Houston. "Mr. President, I've still got a decision to make and I'd like your advice," Bush said. "My House seat is secure - no opposition last time - and I've got a position on Ways and Means. I don't mind taking risks, but in a few more terms, I'll have seniority on a powerful committee. I'm just not sure it's a gamble I should take, whether it's really worth it." "Son," Johnson said, "I've served in the House. And I've been privileged to serve in the Senate, too. And they're both good places to serve. So I wouldn't begin to advise you what to do, except to say this - that the difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." The former president paused. "Do I make my point? — Jon Meacham

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time. — Kate Voegele

At the same time, we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it. I suspect that if anyone other than Jesus (Krishna, say, or Buddha) were suddenly put forward as being due for a second coming, millions in our postsecular society would embrace such a thing uncritically, leaving Enlightenment rationalism huffing and puffing in the rear. We are a puzzled and confused generation, embracing any and every kind of nonrationalism that may offer us a spiritual shot in the arm while lapsing back into rationalism (in particular, the old modernist critiques) whenever we want to keep traditional or orthodox Christianity at bay. — N. T. Wright

Even Mom doesn't understand how being in front of a camera all the time twists and warps you. How one second it makes you feel unbelievably alive and the next publicly strips you down until all that's left is one big question mark. — Heather Demetrios

I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third. — Philip Schultz

First of all, you don't want me to get too hungry. Ever. I'm an ever worse bastard than normal and having starved for centuries, I'm not about to deprive myself again when I don't have to. Second, let me tell you something about your 'friends.' Deimos held me down while I was branded and then took me to the human realm where I was left with nothing. No clothes, no money. Not a damn thing to call my own. Hence the aforementioned starvation. A hundred years later, M'Ordant dumped my inside a Spartan prison camp and told the commander I was a traitor to their people. You don't really want to know what the Spartans did to people they thought betrayed them. D'Alerian had me put inside a Turkish prison in the fifteenth century where I was impaled after being tortured for three weeks. So you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time feeling too sorry for them right now. At least no one's shoving a sharp spike up their asses. (Jericho) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

A certain man who was learning archery faced the target with two arrows in his hand. But his instructor said, ' A beginner ought never to have a second arrow; for as long as he relies upon the other, he will be careless with his first one. At each shot he ought to think that he is bound to settle it with this particular shaft at any cost.' Doubtless he would not intentionally act foolishly before his instructor with one arrow, when he has but a couple. But, though he may not himself realize that he is being careless, his teacher knows it.
You should bear this advice in mind on every occasion. (In the same way) he who follows the path of learning thinks confidently in the evening that the morning is coming, and in the morning that the evening is coming, and that he will then have plenty of time to study more carefully ; less likely still is he to recognize the waste of a single moment. How hard indeed is it to do a thing at once-now, the instant that you think of it ! — Yoshida Kenko

If you want to know the value of a second, ask the person who just crossed the road at the wrong time and barely escaped being hit by a speeding car. — Sunday Adelaja

There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys out warm being. — D.H. Lawrence

Listen, Liar Liar, you promised. Enough with Alex Bainbridge."
Home truths are not meant to be comfortable, I know.Frankie knows it, too, and for a teeny tiny second, I hated him just a teeny tiny bit for knowing just where to stick the pin.
I glared at him. "How did this go from being about Sadie to an assault on my honesty? Huh?"
He shrugged. "I love you, Fiorella. We ain't got no money, honey, but we got love."
I've never been able to hate Frankie for more than a second at a time. — Melissa Jensen

I've been told a time or two that I spiral.
Zero to sixty in the blink of an eye.
One second, I'm perfectly fine, laughing, smiling. The next, I've got my hands around someone's throat, choking the life out of them.
There's probably a name for whatever's wrong with me, but I've got no interest in a diagnosis. I don't need treatment. Until people stop being ignorant, I'm going to keep on getting pissed. No little mood-stabilizing pill can stop that from happening.
But still, sometimes, I can feel it. I feel myself spiraling hard, and falling far, making mountains out of molehills that even I struggle to climb.
And today? I'm feeling it.
My hands shake.
I can hardly see straight. — J.M. Darhower

My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us ... the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment' it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. — Peter Matthiessen

We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God's hand, as they came, as 'accidents'. But in the second week he is beginning to 'know the ropes': by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered. — C.S. Lewis

How did you know? That she wasn't the one for him?" Now he's staring at his hands, slowing rubbing them together. "They just didn't have that ... natural magic. You know? It never seemed easy."
My voice grows tiny. "Do you think things have to be easy? For it to work?"
Cricket's head shoots up, his eyes bulging as they grasp my meaning. "NO. I mean, yes, but ... sometimes there are ... extenuating circumstances. That prevent it from being easy. For a while. But then people overcome those ... circumstances ... and ... "
"So you believe in second chances?" I bite my lip.
"Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right," he adds.
If the person is ... Lola?"
This time, he holds my gaze. "Only if the other person is Cricket."
Chapter 27
Pg 273 — Stephanie Perkins

There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood ... Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended. — Martin Amis

Excuse me? Can I trouble you for a second..."
"Oh, hell..." Oliver raised his hand so Langham didn't speak. "Yes, love, carry on."He waited for the female to speak again, wondering what the bloody hell was about come their way.
"It's just that I'm in this flat and I can't get out."
"Um... Are you alive?"
"I have no idea. I just know I'm this flat and every time I think I'm dead, like now, I wake up again."
"Where is this flat?"
"See, that's the thing. Again, I have no idea..."
Oliver looked at Langham and smiled apologetically.
"Fuck it," Langham said. "You put me off my bloody lunch talking about men's cocks being torn off anyway. What's next? Lay it on me. — Sarah Masters

To my embarrassment, I was crying again. Real girl tears for the second time, these ones born out of frustration. That didn't happen to me very often, but I hated it when it did. It was faulty wiring in the female body, tear ducts attached directly to the frustration meter. Trying to explain to men that no, I wasn't being manipulative, I just couldn't stop my eyes from leaking salt water, only added to the aggravation. — C.E. Murphy

Children were allowed to lie down on the park as it was being moved. This was considered a concession, although no one knew why a concession was necessary, or why it was to children that this concession must be made. The biggest fireworks show in history lit the skies of New York City that night, and the Philarmonic played its heart out.
The children of New York lay on their backs, body to body, filling every inch of the park, as if it had been designed for them and that moment. The fireworks sprinkled down, dissolving in the air just before they reached the ground, and the children were pulled, one millimeter and one second at a time, into Manhattan and adulthood. By the time the park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the park was a mosaic of their dreams. Some hollered out, some smiled unconsciously, some were perfectly still. — Jonathan Safran Foer

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead
indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed. — Yoko Ogawa

The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life
all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.
A mind hearing this pitiless warning
a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate
would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away forever.
Great examples come to your mind and you see clearly that you are a lost soul, your life is being frittered away on petty pleasures and pains and trifling talk. "Shame! Shame!" you cry, and bite your lips. — Nikos Kazantzakis

If there is one thing I can brag about and be proud of in my life, it's my dedication to friendship. If I call you a friend, I mean it. You are now on par with being a family member. Friendships are not made overnight; it takes time, effort, and energy. For me, friendships are tested not in the best of times, but in the worst of times. You don't always get a second chance to be there for someone when they really need you. So when I say I will be there, I mean it. — Leah Remini

What About Object Pooling? In early versions of Java (around the 1.2 time frame), the idea that long-lived objects were good gained currency. I specifically remember being told that "creating an object is the second most expensive thing you can do in Java" (the first being creation of a new thread). The answer, supposedly, was to avoid creating objects whenever possible. Instead, you were supposed to keep objects around and reuse them. — Michael T. Nygard

I just believe that us as women - should not criticize nor pull down other women. And why? Because we're all just trying our best to be beautiful! We all just want to be loved, we want to be beautiful, we're all trying to leave our own legacy! The good news is that the universe is unending and that means there is enough space for each woman on earth to leave her own mark and to be her own legacy. To be her own kind of beautiful. So why spend even a second on trying to take away from another woman? Trying to steal, trying to criticize, trying to oppress? There is enough space for every woman and every kind of beautiful, in this vast cosmos! When you waste any amount of time trying to take what is another's - you are wasting your huge chunk of a galaxy that's already been given to you! — C. JoyBell C.

I knew trucking was growing. It grew from the Second World War to the time that I bought the bridge. There were interstate highways being built. I thought there was opportunity. — Manuel Moroun

It comes and goes. People think if you're sick you become fearless and brave, but you don't. Most of the time it's like being stalked by a psycho, like I might get shot any second. But sometimes I forget for hours.'
'What makes you forget?'
'People. Doing stuff. When I was with you in the wood, I forgot for a whole afternoon. — Jenny Downham

And he got going from there to America. Worked his passage, I s'pose, like a lot more. And I heard he did well in America, too. Got married there. Had a family. But never came back. And you know why? 'Cause if he did, if he ever set foot in Ireland again, you know who'd be waiting for him, don't you?
That's right. The three of 'em. And their box. And the second time they'd make no mistake.
It is a much-overlooked fact that not all of the thousands who fled Ireland in former times did so to escape hunger, deprivation, and persecution. There were also those who went to escape the wrath of the Good People. Many stories illustrated this, the one here being typical. — Eddie Lenihan

There are spaces between breaths, when one year becomes another or one second another. Between the clock's tick and the second's hand. There are all these spaces, these times. Like when a person dies. There has to be time between being there and not being there. — Anne C. George

Seven times I have despised my soul:
The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height.
The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled.
The third time when she was given to choose between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy.
The fourth time when she committed a wrong, and comforted herself that others also commit wrong.
The fifth time when she forbode for weakness, and attributed her patience to strength.
The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.
And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise, and deemed it a virtue. — Kahlil Gibran

He was taking Kevin's cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn't want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn't even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn't want him to label it Guy's First Fuck or Kevin's First Time. He didn't want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised. — Edmund White

Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out - all of them writhing in agony except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more. With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found them till the gamekeepers should come, as they probably would come, to look for them a second time. "Poor darlings - to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o' such misery as yours!" she exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the birds tenderly. — Thomas Hardy

Photographs were more than my livelihood. They were part of my life. The way light fell on a surface never failed to tug at my imagination. The way one picture, a single snapshot, could capture the essence of a time and place, a city, a war, a human being, was embedded in my consciousness. One day, one second, I might close the shutter on the perfect photograph. — Robert Goddard

At the same time he could hardly believe what he had been reading. It struck him as verging on madness. This wild confession, this owing to a crime so outlandish, so totally different from the true ones of mating and theft of the negroes, outraged him with its insolence and perversity. In the conflict of these feelings Erasmus was swept by doubt and loneliness. His whole being seemed under threat of dissolution. What became of law, of legitimacy, of established order, if a man could assume such attitudes of private morality, decide for himself where his fault lay? It turned everything upside down. He could think of nothing more damnable. And yet ... He remembered suddenly the second, rarer smile his cousin had, the one that came slowly, transforming his face. Briefly, unwillingly, Erasmus glimpsed the possibility of freedom. — Barry Unsworth

But there is also a depth-psychology which can discover in physical sickness a spiritual guilt, a person's covert acquiescence in being bound by the "strong man" in such a way that he cannot break free. Here Jesus starts by loosing the spiritual bond: the first thing he says to the lame man who is set before him is: "My son, your sins are forgiven you," and only after his power to forgive sins has been called into question does he utter the second word (which was in principle included in the first): "Rise, take up your pallet and go home" (Mt 2:5, 11). To the sick man by the pool, whom Jesus knew to have been "lying there a long time", he gave this admonition: "See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you" (Jn 5:6, 14). The — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, "All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before." Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions
from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate
are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation. — Marina Gorbis

Sometimes that's all you can do, I think. Hold hands. Because life gets so scary sometimes, so bleak, so cold, that you are beyond being able to be comforted by mere words.


'Men are for amusement only. They are treats. Like candy. Like ice cream on an Alabama afternoon. A dessert. They are not the main course. As soon as you have a man in your life who becomes the main course, that is the time, my sweet, when you should go on a diet. Right that second. Men are for dessert only.' Envision: honey.
'Yum, yum,' I told her.
'They are yummy.' She winked at me. 'But never take them seriously. A bite here and there is puh-lenty. All three of my husbands died, bless their pea-brained souls, but I never thought of them as the chicken and potatoes. They were always the flamin' cherries jubilee at the end of dinner.' She stared off into space. 'And there was many a time, darlin', that I wanted to set them on fire. — Cathy Lamb

An angel lay dying in the mist. Once upon a time.
And the devil should have finished him off without a second thought.
But she hadn't. And if she had? Karou had wondered it a hundred different ways. She'd even wished for it, in her blackest grief at the Kasbah, when all she could see was the death that had come of her mercy.
If she'd killed Akiva that day, or even just let him die, the war would have ground on unbroken. Another thousand years? Maybe. But she hadn't, and it hadn't. "The age of wars is over," Akiva had just said, and even as Karou saw what she saw and no possibility of mistake, and even as her whole being gathered itself into a scream, her heart defied it. The age of wars was over, and Akiva would not die like this.
The blade entered his heart. — Laini Taylor

She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named - when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human. — Miriam Toews

Ah, selfish. There's that word again." Sherry smirked. "It's been hurled at me many a time, because being a mother and wife is all about selflessness, see?" She imitated a perky, syrupy-sweet voice. "Giving up every molecule of your soul. If you want anything for yourself, you're accused of being selfish. Marriage and especially motherhood mean being condemned to play second fiddle your entire life. — Andrea Lochen

Jacob remembered it distinctly because it was his twenty-second birthday, and he was annoyed at being awakened by his uncle at 1:17 in the morning. But Avi had no time to be sentimental. He ordered Jacob to hightail it with him through a bone-chilling winter night to get to some safe house they'd never been to before and make it there by the top of the hour. Jacob had been hoping to sleep in a little and maybe eat a half-decent meal before sitting down to plan the sabotage of a radio tower near Antwerp, an operation scheduled for the coming weekend. But none of that was to be. — Joel C. Rosenberg

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess. — Pierre Bourdieu

It's symbolic of how I feel, with cameras on every street corner. Being watched all the time, having my sense of freedom invaded. Privacy is an important thing, and it has been eroded over the past few years. Now they're talking about body scans at airports. Democracy becomes a sham the second you have to give way to authorities who can do any kind of search that they want with you. — Nitin Sawhney

...as long as her grace remains grace, she remains the only life he has - even while he is whoring around in some Babylonian dive. Whether he behaves or misbehaves, he is dead from start to finish but for her. Unchanging, unswerving, she goes on being his resurrection, the one center at which his sins are always forgiven. All he has to do the seventh time, or the seventy-times-seventh time, is the same thing he did the first time: confess, admit once more the truth of his abiding death, and trust once again the life that never left him for a second. — Robert Farrar Capon

You have hang-ups because of sh*t that happened to you in your past. I already told you I don't like being measured by that *ssh*le's mistakes, but a second ago you thought the worst. I've been spending time with you, trying to show you who I am. You're a smart woman. I know you can tell the difference between us. But if you're gonna think that every time I'm away from you that I'm doing you wrong, then you're never truly going to be happy. — Jordan Silver

She wasn't too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don't know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do. — William Faulkner

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world. — Ruth Ozeki

Control yourself every passing second and make sure that no unit of time is being wasted — Sunday Adelaja

After five years in Ferrari, being second all the time, I think it was enough for me. — Fernando Alonso

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. — Ernst F. Schumacher