Old 3 Seconds Quotes & Sayings

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer. — Antonio Damasio

He was keeping track of time. It was nearly two hours since he had last looked at his watch, but he knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service. When you're waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock onto the steady pace of the passing seconds. It's like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in. But it keeps you just awake enough to be reach for whatever you need to be ready for. And it means you always know what time it is. — Lee Child

I never asked to be born, and death's no question.
The sun's still shining off the same old lessons,
Then why does life feel like an educated guess?
And my thoughts are like meals ... I'm a sucker for the seconds. — Amir Mohamed

Sam Cleary reached the two old men fighting on the ground and used the fire extinguisher for the first time, bringing it down two-handed to hit Charlie Manx in the face. He would use it for the second time on Tom Priest, not thirty seconds later, by which time Tom was well dead.
Not to mention well done. — Joe Hill

Picking locks or handcuffs for me is not really a big deal, I can do it pretty much in seconds, I've been doing since I was 14 years old. I used to sit on my bed as a kid with a pick set and you know just picking locks and stuff, so I'm used to it. — Criss Angel

Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away. — Malcolm Gladwell

And she swung the old oar at him with all her strength.
It hit with a great thwack, splintering in two, and he went over the side, into the dark, cold waters of the lake, sinking like a stone.
It took her two seconds. And then she let out a scream for help, tossing the broken oar away from her, and jumped into the water after him.
It was very cold, numbingly so, and as it closed over her head she grabbed for
him, wrapping her arms around his body, ready to sink to the bottom with him.
Instead he kicked, pushing them up so that they broke the surface, his arm
clamped around hers as she struggled. "Jesus, woman!" he snapped. "When did we have to become Romeo and Juliet? — Anne Stuart

I am 1324512000 seconds old. In the cosmic blink of an eye, I will become once again cosmic dust. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

She didn't even notice right away that a small animal had come out from behind a nearby car and was slowly making its way toward the trash can she was standing near. She flipped through some old files in her mind, trying to come up with what this thing might be, and after a few seconds decided that
impossible as it seemed
it was a fox. — Maureen Johnson

It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Mance, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music. — Thomas Keneally

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all. — Alan Lightman

Kenny, in his late fifties, noticed that senior citizens get free coffee at a local cafe. He asked, "How old do you have to be to be a senior citizen?" The waiter looked at him for a few seconds and without saying a word, poured him a cup of coffee. — Ed Fischer

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. — Vernor Vinge

When the word began to get out, the idea of tying imitations of aquatic worms was not met with universal approval in the fly-fishing community. It seems that worms had somehow gotten a bad name. I think a fishing pal of mine hit it on the head when he said, It just pisses them off that you can catch trout, I mean really big trout, on a fly that a five-year old can tie in twenty seconds! — Ed Engle

There's an old adage that for every second too fast per mile in the first half of the race, you'll run at least 2 seconds slower at the end. — Jeff Galloway

Who are you?" I demanded when I was certain he couldn't escape my grip.
"I'm a twenty-four-year-old Taurus who enjoys long walks on the beach." Even though I couldn't see his face, I could feel his arrogant grin.
"You have ten seconds to explain yourself," I ordered. "Or I'm really going to hurt you."
"Oh, come on! Can't we get back to the kissing? You can't tease a guy like that. — Ada Adams

All too familiar, he relived those few traumatic seconds at the wheel of Joe Henry's old black Framo van. He recalled his terror as he saw the border guard kneel down — Ken Follett

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. — Haruki Murakami

It was the music that finally roused Leo back to consciousness. "Hey. I like that old song," he croaked, completely oblivious to the calamitous chain reaction of the previous 10 seconds. That is until he realized there was a dead body separating him and Kay. — Delora Dennis

Its very pulse, if I may use the word, was like no other clock. It did not mark the flight of every moment with a gentle second stroke, as though it would check old Time, and have him stay his pace in pity, but measured it with one sledge-hammer beat, as if its business were to crush the seconds as they came trooping on, and remorselessly to clear a path before the Day of Judgment. — Charles Dickens

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend
if possible, a deaf one. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The New Age? It's just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds. — James Randi

I suddenly remember an old game I used to play when I was nine or ten, and I was allowed to ride my bike until it got dark. I used to make little bets with myself as I watched the sun getting lower and lower on the horizon: If I hold my breath to twenty seconds, the night won't come. If I don't blink. If I stand so still a fly lands on my cheek. Now, I find myself doing the same thing, bargaining to keep Kate, even though that isn't the way it works. — Jodi Picoult

Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and his daughters, little darlin. — Annie Proulx

We had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended all the way up in the northernmost extremes of the north, and every soul begotten upon this land was a bastard child of that interminable human equation: colonizer and colony, slave and master, rapist and victim, and any pledge to loyalty and patriotism was an oath to both parts of this equation - we were the seconds obliviously turned up on the old, unregenerate battlefield, here to fight in history's redundant, never-ending duel, always carrying someone else's sword and flag in the name of the myth. — John M. Keller

When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said ... She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back
undoing what she had just done
so that she could know I was OK. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Here in Texas, that's not how it works. When we threw ourselves on Slip'N Slides, we were met with a bone-crushingly hard ground that was sparsely covered by grass that had the consistency of old hay. As we slid down the yellow tarp for our three seconds of fun, we'd experience the familiar explosions of pain when previously undiscovered rocks or sticks jabbed into our internal organs. Then we'd slide off the end into fire ants. — Jennifer Fulwiler

And now he couldn't cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. — Richard K. Morgan

What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event - in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It's the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It's the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you'll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It's one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It's not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it's the essence of ambition. — Dave Harvey

As we approached the shop, a dog began to bark. Seconds later, a furry drool-bedecked face pressed against the lower portion of the glass door, his whole butt shaking from how hard he wagged his tail.
"What's gotten into you, Dexter?" Tyler muttered. Then he came closer and saw Bones and me on the other side of the glass.
Oh HELL no, bolted across his mind.
"Is that any way to greet old friends?" Bones asked dryly.
Tyler drew his shoulders back, further stretching ther strained fabric of his shirt.
"That's not a greeting, sugar. It's my answer to whatever you've come here to ask me to do. — Jeaniene Frost