Quotes & Sayings About The Hourglass

He dreamed of deserts and great empty cities and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone. — Laini Taylor

Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out. — Paul Murray

I'm really into lip cream. I have this one by Hourglass: it's an oil with this gold-tip applicator, and it's schmancy-schmancy. When you get to the point that your lips are cracking, the price is worth it. — Anna Kendrick

It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. — Don DeLillo

The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding. — Mary Karr

The minute grains of sand slipped silently down the curved hourglass, no matter how many times the people of Earth willed them not to. Time, fate and the actions of others were out of their control. — S.R. Crawford

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not. — Soren Kierkegaard

The hours went by quickly, like the proverbial sands slipping down, down, down the center of the hourglass. — Victoria Kahler

If I didn't love the hourglass, I wouldn't love myself. — Rachel Roy

Life's like an hourglass glued to the table. — Anna Nalick

What seems dangerous often is not - black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight - this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments onshore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe. — Amy Hempel

Though our hourglass runs, one day it shall not, but then our eternity hourglass begins with never ending sands, what mantle do you want to set your hourglass of eternal life upon? This in your choice to make, no one but you can make that decision. So think wisely and live honorable, for your actions will choice the destination of your hourglass. — Tabitha Robin

Our lives are but specks of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. — Socrates

Everyone knew the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the Sandman and how he brought sweet dreams to sleepers. An early, now-defunct Reve company had even used him as their mascot. But that's all the Sandman had been - a mascot. A little grinning elf holding an hourglass. — Erin Kellison

What did you do?" Kate asked.
"Nothing. We're inside the wards." Simon laughed and drank the elixir.
She looked around with surprise. "How can you tell? At night? In the snow?"
"That tree." He indicated an ash tree standing amidst other ash trees.
"It looks like a thousand other trees."
"No, it looks like you." Simon took a shallow, pained breath, but smiled. "It's my marker."
Both Kate and Malcolm stared at the tree. Kate cocked her hip. "It looks like me? A tree? That's flattering."
"Yes. See how the curves
" Simon worked his hands in an hourglass shape. "It looks like you. — Clay Griffith

I feel badly for those girls who have to be so waif thin, doing those catwalks all the time because, luckily, we're going into a different time - that's what they're saying, at least - in we're appreciating a curvier figure. But to be honest, I couldn't be like an hourglass if I tried. — Christine Teigen

The miser is counting his gold pieces, unaware of Death, who holds two clear symbols: an hourglass and a pitchfork."
"Why a pitchfork and not a scythe?"
"Because Death reaps but the Devil harvests — Arturo Perez-Reverte

Funny, gorgeous, and a genius. What a package. He backed out of the parking space, smiling as he drove away.
I loved that he left crazy off the list.
I loved it even more that he would never think to add it. — Myra McEntire

The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart. — Joshua Cohen

If he wasn't already holding my heart in the palm of his hand, I would have taken it out and given it to him right then. — Myra McEntire

Emerson, you just shared your deepest secret with me. I value that. Don't make light of it.
If he wasn't already holding my heart in the palm of his hand, I would have taken it out and given it to him. — Myra McEntire

And my eyes! I see through hourglass pupils and therefore I see time-as it affects all things. Even as I look at you now, Tanis," the mage whispered, "I see you dying, slowly, by inches. And so I see every living thing. — Margaret Weis

The mind, the heart, the womb. Those three are all threaded in a sacred dance. A woman's pelvis is like an hourglass with the capacity to tell time. It both creates and shelters life. When a mother's diet in insufficient, nutrients are pulled from her own teeth and bone. Women are built to be selfless. — Alyson Richman

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass ... if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass ... slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own ... structure. — Dale Carnegie

The hourglass runs low ... — Christopher Pike

Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain. — Rabih Alameddine

Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight. — Robert A. Heinlein

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.
In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? — Margaret Atwood

The plus-size revolution that has been happening lately is incredible but it's also creating this "other" beauty standard in which you have to be an hourglass, you have to be super sexy and fierce about showing off your curves. That's quite frightening to me, and I don't fit in it, I don't want to fit it. — Beth Ditto

Inside, The Boneyard seemed to cover the area of a township and the bar looked as long as the railroad tracks. Round pools of light on the green poker tables alternated with hourglass shapes of exciting gloom, through which drink girls and change girls moved like white-legged witches. By the jazz-stand in the distance, belly dancers made their white hourglass shapes. The gamblers were thick and hunched down as mushrooms, all bald from agonizing over the fall of a card or a die or the dive of an ivory ball, while the Scarlet Women were like fields of poinsettia. — Harlan Ellison

The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side. — Sarah Waters

Reality spills through her slim fingers like the sands of an hourglass. Thus time is by no means on her side — Haruki Murakami

The back barn door opened, and in walked a vision in a billowing green dress. As she led in her mare, Mr. McBride's voice faded away as Tom's total attention turned to the girl. About twenty-one or two, Tom guessed. Not too tall, nor short. Beautiful heart-shaped face decorated with rosy cheeks and light freckles. Long auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. Perfectly set green eyes. Full-bosomed and hourglass shaped. Breathtaking. — C.G. Faulkner

The sand in the hourglass flows only one way. Don't waste precious time chasing someone else's definition of success. Live your life with purpose now. Look for the things that inspire you, trouble you, make you feel most alive, and trust in those things to shape your future. They will give you all your heart could ever wish for. — Bill Strickland

We still have time," Kell assured him, getting to his feet.
"How do you know?" asked Hastra. "We can't hear the bells down here, and there are no windows to gauge the light." "Magic," Kell said, and then, when Hastra's eyes widened, he gestured to the hourglass sitting on the table with his other tools. "And that. — V.E Schwab

Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It's a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It's the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most. — Ben Shapiro

A slippery fish, flashing scales in the water and a noble fighter on the line, but dull as lead at the bottom of the boat. — Michael David Lukas

It's time, my children
When the waves rise high
When the waters run deep
When the clock strikes midnight
You'll feel the mark of Zero Hour
And you'll never be the same again — Lisa Mangum

I wish I had the power to flip my reality upside down like an hourglass, and that life wasn't a finite affair, but rather a perpetually recurring passage through a hole in time. — Anne Fortier

The room was an hourglass that hadn't yet turned. — Samantha Shannon

also may be untrue. One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Does Luke hope? — Margaret Atwood

Life is like an Hourglass. The grains of sand drop one by one and then it's all over. Live before you die. - RVM. — R.v.m.

Our father Blue Bones was much the same and we brothers cowered before his fury when TRACKED-IN SAND was detected on the carpets of the VAUXHALL CRESTA and then there were such threats of whippings with razor strops, electric flex, greenhide belts, God save us, he had that mouth, cruel as a cut across his skin. As a boy I could never understand why nice clean sand would cause such terror in my dad's bloodshot eyes, but I had never seen an hourglass and did not know that I would die. None shall be spared, and when my father's hour was come then the eternal sand-filled wind blew inside his guts and ripped him raw, God forgive him for his sins. He could never know peace in life or even death, never understood what it might be to become a grain of sand, falling whispering with the grace of multitudes, through the fingers of the Lord. — Peter Carey

Like an hourglass with a certain number of grains of sand within it, God has appointed your life to last only a certain number of days, and you have absolutely no idea how many there are ... In God's presence, consider: I have no idea when my life will end. All I know is that death will come for me eventually. Am I doing anything to prepare for the real possibility that God may call me, sooner rather than later? If he called me into eternity today, would I be ready? — Patrick Madrid

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind. — Paula McLain

There is so much to say. It is like shoving all the sand of the world into an hourglass. Or trying to get it out. — Gayle Forman

Don't wait to decide what the hell's important and worth the precious sand in your hourglass. — J.T. Sawyer

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it. — James Branch Cabell

Global warming will threaten our crops, so natural food will be scarce. Hourglass, curvy bodies will be the aspirational beauty standard, representing that those women have access to bounties of fulfilling yet healthy food, which means they are affluent. — Tyra Banks

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties. — Jules Renard

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing. — Jorge Luis Borges

There's a saying that goes like this: The hourglass freezes in moments of sorrow. Races along in moments of bliss." He spun and pulled me to my feet. Cupping my cheeks, he gazed into my eyes. "The very concept of time is a demand. That you own it, savor it, mean it. Before you waste it . . . or it wastes you. — Christine Le

And at that moment, for no reason he could put into words, the hourglass shattered. No more, the cool gray sift of days, the diligent waiting for the future to trickle forth. Lazlo's dream was spilled out into the air, the color and storm of it no longer a future to be reached, but a cyclone here and now. He didn't know what, but as surely as one feels the sting of shards when an hourglass tips of a shelf and smashes, he knew that something was happening.
Right now. — Laini Taylor

One of the best parts of a woman's body is that curve, and I go a little bit higher on all of my things to show off the best part of the hourglass. — Melissa McCarthy

Tuxedo Guy looked even better the closer he got to us- tall wide shoulders, smooth skin, those lips. — Myra McEntire

I've put one foot before another and the years have passed, the time marked by late rent payments and the appearance of wrinkles - tiny ones, on the corners of my eyes. They are a reminder of my youth, and of the hourglass that we all live in, grains of sand slipping through the gap of time, each granule adding another wrinkle, another pocket of fat, another sag that I will fight to overcome, another grey hair to pluck or dye. — Alessandra Torre

Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on. The most we can hope a watch to do is mark that progress. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able. — Dava Sobel

As we hypnotically watch the steadily diminishing reserve of sand in life's hourglass, the instincts of a miser surface. Life is now savored, sipped as with a fine 19th Century French wine. — Joe L. Wheeler

We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone. — Pablo Picasso

I deserve to be happy and I think a lot of people stay in relationships for wrong reasons and instead of just looking at each other and just saying, 'you know, it's like sands of the hourglass, we learned our lessons, we can end in war or we can end in peace.' — Jenny McCarthy

Listening to Evanescence makes me want to break up with a girl in real time as a giant antique hourglass falls to the floor in slow motion. — Dane Cook

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I? — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

He bent down burying his face in my neck. I reached back to grab onto the iron bars behind me to hold myself up. My jacket slipped off my shoulders. I was pretty sure I was on fire and at that moment I would have sworn that bursting into flame was a glorious way to go. — Myra McEntire

Filled with hope, Ico looked into Yorda's eyes. He felt like was looking into an hourglass, trying to pick through the grains of sand for some truth buried there long ago. He hadn't found anything yet, but the warmth of Yorda's hands in his told him that he was getting close. — Miyuki Miyabe

It is clear, for example, that many Americans did not like the idea of avant-garde art, especially in relation to women's fashion. Many people were particularly indignant about what seemed to them the deliberate obliteration of sexual attractiveness, which they identified with the tightwaisted dress and the hourglass figure. — Valerie Steele

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! — Friedrich Nietzsche

A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass. — Hester Lynch Piozzi

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the representation of time itself changed; it moved away from allegorical human figures - an old man, a blind youth holding an hourglass, a woman with bared breasts representing Fate - to the impersonal language of numbers: railroad schedules, the bottom line of industrial progress. Time was no longer shifting sand; time was money. Yet the modern era also allowed for multiple conceptions of time and made the experience of time more individual and creative. — Svetlana Boym

Aren't I supposed to be brave, fearless? Isn't that what the world expects?"
"Screw what the world expects. Think about all the things you've faced. You cracked, but you didn't break. You're still standing. I'd call that fearless. You've already conquered so much. — Myra McEntire

I lifted my chin, meeting the eyes of the woman who'd become the living embodiment of my totem, my bright phoenix, and forged ahead. "But I live with the wrong choices, the paths untraveled, the lives lost, and I never hold those regrets against anyone but myself. So, if you have some reason that you think I'll regret getting in that car or not getting in that car, then tell me. Because I won't have anything between us, either." My mind flashed to an hourglass, grains of sand trickling away, carrying my life with them. "At least, nothing that we can avoid...like the fear of unspoken words. — Marie Castle

My clothes have always got a very strong dynamic rapport with the body - they are very body conscious, they help you to look glamorous, more hourglass, more woman. — Vivienne Westwood

I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over. — Haruki Murakami

Death is just the moment that your hourglass runs out of sand. That's it. It happens to everyone eventually. All any of us gets to decide is where the sand falls. — Ryan Winfield

The two thought themselves alone. But all the while, one watched with the night-wide eyes of love. While they paced the pebbled paths between the silent flowers' spiked arrays, sage Thyme spied upon each pale sigh, peeping between bloom and leaf. And while they sat side by side and hand in hand on the stained stone bench beneath the spreading wisteria, Thyme watched unwinking from the midnight face of the mute sundial. And while they lay lazy on the soft grass, swearing the sweet oaths of love and longing, and whispering as they parted that though long lives might pass like a night and the New Sun sunder the centuries, yet never should they ever part, Thyme crept and cried, counting seconds that spilled with the sand from the hourglass, and scenting the soft breezes that cooled the child's burning cheek with his sad spice. The — Gene Wolfe

Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he'd always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds. — Tommy Wallach

Beneath the ash trees on Johnson Street, just east of campus, Hourglass Vintage stood in a weathered brick building, wedged between a fair-trade coffee shop and a bike-repair business. — Susan Gloss

There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."
Like somehow we're running out of time. — Chuck Palahniuk

Your existence is passing before you. Grains of sand in the hourglass. The Wicked Witch of the West has you in her castle and she's turned the hourglass over and the sand is running through. Will you be liberated or will you die? The only way you can beat death is liberation. — Frederick Lenz

The sand in the hourglass runs from one compartment to the other, marking the passage of moments with something constant and tangible.
If you watch the flowing sand, you might see time itself riding the granules.
Contrary to popular opinion, time is not an old white-haired man, but a laughing child.
And time sings. — Vera Nazarian

No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day. — Tom Perrotta

She slipped off the lid and took out a little hourglass hanging on a silver pivot from a black ribbon, its belly full of twinkling black sand.
"Oh, it's beautiful!"
"You like it."
Her guardian, the antiquarian, who invested every colour, gemstone, beast, and planet with arcane and symbolic meaning, would likely give her a lecture on saturnine influences. Blanche decided not to care. "Yes, I do. — Suzannah Rowntree