Years To Seconds Quotes & Sayings

He had the face of a floating astronaut who had lost his tether and had only one chance to grab a lifeline or forever drift away into endless black. I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. — Lissa Price

Time plays no role in the life of one man - the subtle consciousness of it floating past me is more than enough. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds - what does it matter? Floating by, it rubs against my skin, face, and hair - wearing me down, yet polishing me all the while. Time is like fine grains of sand in a desert storm. At first, you don't pay any attention to it, but the more it hits you in the face, the more aware of it you become, the more annoying it gets until, one day, you find yourself suffocating. The weight of it eventually bends your spine, until you are crawling on your hands and knees, unable to stand straight. Then comes the time to crawl back into the womb, crawl inside and wait for rebirth. — Henry Martin

I sleep for an entire day. And when I wake up I'm a new person. I'm empty. I've cried out everything I had in me. I'm an empty shell waiting to be filled with what comes next. Or I'm just being a total drama queen. I'm not empty. I'm still a person. I cried over a bad thing that happened in my life, but I probably shouldn't have. Compared to Mom's crisis, mine was small. Compared to a thousand other girls' around the world, mine is insignificant. It wasn't bad. Not compared to everyone else. It was just a couple seconds. It wasn't years. It wasn't months, like Mom. It wasn't a family member. Wasn't someone I see anymore. It didn't even hurt. There was no blood. It wasn't bad. Not compared to others'. So I should stop crying. — Sara Wolf

I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds. — Jon Scieszka

I believe some people are inherently evil.
I believe guilt is a powerful motivator.
I believe redemption is something you can strive for but never fully achieve.
I believe second chances exist only in dreams, never in reality.
I believe you don't have years, or months, or weeks to impact a person's life.
You have seconds.
Seconds to win them over, And seconds to lose them. — K.A. Tucker

For example, knowing that it takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass, gives one a better grasp of the relative magnitudes of these two common numbers. — John Allen Paulos

That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I've been counting." He — Douglas Adams

This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form becomes a word. — Ann Beattie

All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses - fix your bayonets boys - gentlemen, synchronize your watches - in ten seconds time the barrage starts, ... a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years. — Peter Ustinov

You may spend years being somebody to everybody, yet you can't find 60 seconds to be someone to someone else. Find the time today to be somebody's someone. — Robert J. Braathe

The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle ... yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. — William S. Burroughs

I can teach you to jump up in five seconds-it takes years to learn how to land properly. — David Lee Roth

My smell stays with you? I ruined you ... for what?"
"Your smell keeps me going all the time. I'm in a clutch game or at practice and it's full count? Your cloves and vanilla scent calms me down. I spray it on the front of my uniform and rub my right hand across like this." I demonstrate by rubbing my chest and she watches me in fascination like a starstruck teenager watches a rockstar play his bass. "I went to three different stores before I found the exact scent. Expensive. French perfume. Chamade by Guerlain."
She nods looking fascinated or charmed by me at least for a few seconds. "I got it in Paris when I was there a few years ago. I love it."
"I do too. So yes, you ruined me. For anyone else."
She's smiling but then it slowly disappears like a countdown does as it goes from ten to zero. "What are you doing to me, Elvis?" she asks, looking troubled. — Katherine Owen

I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick. — Glendon Swarthout

Athletes train 15 years for 15 seconds of performance. Ask them if they got lucky. Ask an athlete how he feels after a good workout. He will tell you that he feels spent. If he doesn't feel that way, it means he hasn't worked out to his maximum ability.
Losers think life is unfair. They think only of their bad breaks. They don't consider that the person who is prepared and playing well still got the same bad breaks but overcame them. That is the difference. His threshold for tolerating pain becomes higher because in the end he is not training so much for the game but for his character. Alexander Graham Bell was desperately trying to invent a hearing aid for his partially deaf wife. He failed at inventing a hearing aid but in the process discovered the principles of the telephone. You wouldn't call someone like that lucky, would you?Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Without effort and preparation, lucky coincidences don't happen. — Shiv Khera

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates
the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes
have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria ... After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. — Janine Benyus

Monty Python paid me £20,000 to write, direct and assemble them - the cheapskates! I told them I'd never earned less in a year since leaving Cambridge. The first show sold out in 43 seconds and we ended up performing ten in total. We had no idea there would be such demand. — Eric Idle

My dear wife is two years, three months, and seven days older than I am. I told her if she pisses me off enough, I'm going to figure out the hours, minutes, and seconds. — Dan Adams

So finally, as a pair of twentysomething men passed by holding hands, Austin said, "Hey, that could be us in ten years."
And Hugo said, "Or ten months."
And Austin said, "Or ten days."
And Hugo said, "Or ten minutes."
And Austin said, "Or ten seconds."
Then they each counted to ten, and held hands for the rest of the day. — David Levithan

Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you? — Cecelia Ahern

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time — Julian Barnes

The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened, brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in the room became utter; it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb burn so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into the street, and a window through which-had he but the will (or strength) to tear the blinds back-he might glimpse a rumor of morning. — Clive Barker

You never get a second chance to make a great first impression. Within a few seconds, with just a glance, people have judged your social and economic level, your level of education, and even your level of success. Within minutes, they've also decided your levels of intelligence, trustworthiness, competence, friendliness and confidence. Although these evaluations happen in an instant, they can last for years: first impressions are often indelible. — Olivia Fox Cabane

Plastic should be a high value material ... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it
I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley) — Susan Freinkel

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

It's finger time! Steve simply grunted.
Li responded like she always had to the request over the past years, by walking over to the tall oak cabinet in his office and pulling out a pack of Vienna Fingers. She then closed the door and walked around the desk and dropped to her knees, crawling the few extra feet under his desk. Li handed the red and white plastic package of cookies to Steve, who slid the tray open while his virtual slave unzipped the trousers of his blue Armani pinstripe suit and then dug deep to find his pleasure source.
Twenty seconds later, when both of them had consumed their mid-afternoon snacks, Steve transitioned back into his unrelenting work persona. — Phil Wohl

She used these moments as she used all such time now to gird herself for the coming necessities. Time pressed; a special calendar drove her. She had looked at a calendar before leaving Chapter House, caught as often happened to her by the persistence of time and its language: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years ... Standard Years, to be precise. Persistence was an inadequate word for the phenomenon. Inviolability was more like it. Tradition. Never disturb tradition. She held the comparisons firmly in mind, the ancient flow of time imposed on planets that did not tick to the primitive human clock. A week was seven days. Seven! How powerful that number remained. Mystical. It was enshrined in the Orange Catholic Bible. The Lord made a world in six days "and on the seventh day He rested." Good for Him! Odrade thought. We all should rest after great labors. — Frank Herbert

Whatever you do in life will be insignificant. but it is very important that you do it because, You can't know; You can't ever really know the meaning of your life, and you don't need to. Just know that your life has a meaning. Every life has a meaning; whether it lasts one-hundred years or one-hundred seconds.Every life and every death changes the world in its own way. Gandhi knew this. He knew his life would mean something to someone, somewhere, somehow. And he knew with as much certainty that he could never know that meaning. He understood that enjoying life should be of much greater concern than understanding it. And so do I. You can't know. So don't take it for granted; but don't take it too seriously. Don't postpone what you want. Don't leave anything misunderstood. Make sure the people you care about know. Make sure they know how you really feel. Because just like that it could end. — Will Fetters

Some say loyalty inspires boundless hope. And while that may be, there is a catch. True loyalty takes years to build... and only seconds to destroy. — Emily Thorne

Days like these go on for years. It's the ones you want to last that slip away - one, two, three - in seconds. — Gayle Forman

During her sixty-one years on the planet - minus 343 hours, 47 minutes, 32 seconds in space - she joined, then helped lead, the boldest steps yet taken to explore and protect the big blue marble that is our home. As the popular image of women progressed from Doris Day to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the real boundaries were expanded from the secretarial pool to the ocean of space, she helped prove that The Right Stuff doesen't require the right plumbing; that girls and women can do anything they want. — Lynn Sherr

It was surprising how many days and years mattered not at all. His story, the heart of him, was really made up of only a handful of seconds or minutes. The rest was empty road, an expanse that only prolonged the travel from one point to another. — Nadia Hashimi

A few years back, one bleak winter afternoon, on the way home from the Pioneer Market on Columbus, some faceless yuppie shoved past March saying "Excuse me," which in New York translates to "Get the fuck outta my way," and which turned out finally to be once too often. March dropped the bags she was carrying in the filthy slush on the street, gave them a good kick, and screamed as loud as she could, "I hate this miserable shithole of a city!" Nobody seemed to take notice, though the bags and their strewn contents were gone in seconds. The only reaction was from a passerby who paused to remark, "So? you don't like it, why don't you go live someplace else? — Thomas Pynchon

Relationships are like a book,
It takes few seconds to burn,
But
It takes years to write,
So write it carefully
And
Never let it burn — Aditya Nighot

There are moments in a creative life when you understand why you do it. Those moments might last a few seconds or maybe, for some people, years. But whatever the actual time that passes, they still feel like a single moment. Fragile in the way a moment is, liable to be shattered by a breath, set apart from all the other passing time, distinct.
But then it changes. And what seemed unimaginably exhilarating gets bogged down, even when a project is going well. It is a gradual, inevitable sobering during which your right to be passive diminishes. What the ether has given you, now in fact belongs to you. And then it is work. Then it is hard. — Robin Black

Some people look at a picture for thirty seconds, some for years. It doesn't really matter because a picture is like life. You take out of life as much as you are able to take out of life, just as you take out of a picture as much as you can take out of a picture ... — Oliviero Toscani

Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister. — Douglas Adams

You're going to go living. Because living is the challenge, Josie. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take eighty years and you do something in that time, whether it's giving birth to a baby or being a housewife or a barrister or a soldier. You've accomplished something. To throw that away at such a young age, to have no hope, is the biggest tragedy. — Melina Marchetta

There is no telling what is going to happen in the music business in the next few years, hours, minutes, seconds. Giving artists the chance to produce and distribute their own material is great, very empowering. The technological changes that are happening so rapidly now, amongst all the opinions, are in truth, only two things, inevitable and unstoppable. — Pauley Perrette

When I worked as a newspaper photo engraver in the only job I ever had, many years ago, I'd get the train home to Pukerua Bay where I was staying with my parents. An hour ride, 16 stops, and almost always, I'd have automatic wake-up, seconds before we pulled into my station. — Peter Jackson

It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds. — Paula Scher

Have you ever seen a stereogram?
The 'Truth' the Stereogram shows us is there in front of us. Training and work doesn't make us see it.
It's a point of view, a different way of looking at it.
When you see it you try to explain it to someone else and you
realize you can't.
It simple, super simple, yet almost impossible to explain.
There are 'techniques' to see them but some people may spend
years trying without results. Others can do it in seconds.
It doesn't change the fact that the image is there all the time in
front of us.
And it's Beautiful. — T.R. Cordon

It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'
He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it. — Jonathan Franzen

A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light. — Ragnar Frisch

You get into moods - like, if somebody does something to you, then you're angry for maybe 30 seconds, or maybe 30 years. I was always interested in capturing those awful, unflattering things that everybody goes through - those hot moments, captured in ice. — Bill Callahan

I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction. And we're all going and swimming as fast as we can, helping it along. — Lauren Oliver

true loyalty takes years to build but only seconds to destroy — Mike Kelley

Just a moment.
Just 1 second, just 1 more minute, just give me another hour or maybe the weekend to think it over it's not so much it's not so hard it's all we ever ask for it's a simple request.
But the moments the seconds the minutes the hours the days and years become one big mistake, one extraordinary opportunity slipped right through our fingers because we couldn't decide, we couldn't understand, we needed more time, we didn't know what to do.
We don't even know what we've done.
We have no idea how we even got here when all we ever wanted was to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night and maybe stop for ice cream on the way home and that one decision, that one choice, that one accidental opportunity unraveled everything we've ever known and ever believed in and what do we do?
What do we do from here? — Tahereh Mafi

Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune's orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I will miss myself in relation to others. The rareness. The exceptional differences. I will miss the gift that comes with hardship and paying the price. I will miss the tragedy of my own life. As I once spoke...emphatically, but I now repeat here, quietly - the pain, the pain is what made it so God damn beautiful. I endured. You can wait a lifetime for thirty seconds, five minutes, or for an hour to come into your life - a brief interval that makes all the suffering purposeful. In such moments of splendor and rapture - even if the rapture be stilled, the private hours and years of reckoning are unloaded, a burden lifted and the spirit feels as it did on the happiest day of its life when it was young and untormented Or rather, unconscious of the torment waiting to be ignited. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

I have spent 20
years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and
scream, that takes 30 seconds. — Andrea Dworkin

I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. And your last thought, as you stretch your arm until your fingers are inches from that lifeline, is how if you survive, you'll find a way to help fix what was broken, so you can say that yes, you want to be part of the world again. — Lissa Price

Love is nothing like anyone expects it to be. It can happen in a matter of seconds, minutes, days, months or years. No one can explain why it happens, it just does. Love changes a person whether they realize it or not and whether they want it or not. Love can bring happiness and in the same breath, love can bring pain. — D.M. Omar

For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another. — Marcel Proust

One of the simplest ways to get an idea of one trillion dollars is to consider the amount in terms of the passage of time. One million seconds is equal to roughly eleven days and twelve hours, and one billion seconds is thirty-two years. One trillion seconds equals thirty-two thousand years. — Geoff Davis

You think your show of defiance will save you from my dominance? From my wrath? Trust me, you haven't seen my worst. There are ways of torturing a vampire that can drive them literately insane. I know ways of making you suffer that will last for months or years - not seconds. I want you to test me so that I can teach you who your master is. Now get the fuck up and follow me. If I have to tell you again, I'm going to cut off your hand and send it to the werewolves."

Theoden to Noel — Nicholas Bella

My friends asked me to be a reverend at their wedding in France a few years ago. I went on the Internet, and within 15 seconds, I was printing out a certificate which allowed me to officiate at their wedding. — Lucy Punch

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

Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace.It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him. — Baudouin Of Belgium

She bit the inside of her cheek. "You wouldn't keep secrets from me, would you? I mean we've been friends how long?"
"We have been friends, thirteen years, eight months, two weeks, four days," The wheelchair stopped and Ari watched the long shadow look at his watch. "Sixteen hours, four minutes and forty seven seconds and counting I'd say; give or take thirty minutes. Or if you want the short version: five thousand and four days plus or minus a few hours."
She put her hands to her face and laughed to keep from crying. "Please tell me you made half of that up. Who actually keeps track of time like that? — Victoria Escobar

I joked recently that I thought 30 seconds a day for three years would be the best way to enjoy it, and I'm going to stand by that statement. — Mitchell Hurwitz

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds. — George Bernard Shaw

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

But the moments the seconds the minutes the hours the days and years become one big mistake, one extraordinary opportunity slipped right through our fingers because we couldn't decide, we couldn't understand, we needed more time, we didn't know what to do.
We don't even know what we have done. — Tahereh Mafi

Living is the challenge. Not dying. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take you eighty years and you do something in that time. — Melina Marchetta

It takes only one word to hurt a woman, a matter of seconds, one stupid, impatient blow of the crop. But winning back her trust takes years. And sometimes there isn't the time. — Nina George

Adding travel time lost during the pit stop between photon absorption and re-emission, the total trip lasts about a million years. If a photon had a clear path from the Sun's center to its surface, its journey would instead last all of 2.3 seconds. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark.
It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years. — Maggie Stiefvater

I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years. — Klaus Kinski

Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God. — H. Fischer-Hullstrung

SAS is 'created' 50 million times a year, 15 seconds at a time. These 50 million 'moments of truth' are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company. They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative. — Jan Carlzon

The body takes about seven years to replace all its cells. As we age original factory parts get harder to come by. We accept seconds and rebuilds. Some are even transplanted with recycled parts. We get less miles to the gallon, and eventually, after several towings, we must abandon the body by the side of the road. From there we must go the rest of the way alone with just our heart for guidance. — Stephen Levine

Peace and trust take years to build and seconds to shatter. — Mahogany SilverRain

I haven't been a good guest in Hugo's life. I access his memories and discover that he and Austin first became boyfriends at this very celebration, a year ago this weekend. They'd been friends for a little while, but they'd never talked about how they felt. They were each afraid of ruining the friendship, and instead of making it better, their caution made everything awkward. So finally, as a pair of twentysomething men passed by holding hands, Austin said, "Hey, that could be us in ten years."
And Hugo said, "Or ten months."
And Austin said, "Or ten days."
And Hugo said, "Or ten minutes."
And Austin said, "Or ten seconds."
Then they each counted to ten, and held hands for the rest of the day.
The start of it.
Hugo would have remembered this.
But I didn't. — David Levithan

At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father's piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze," as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I thought, had this piano been played by such a master-I had the feeling that Fleisher has sized up the piano's character and perhaps its idiosyncrasies within seconds, that he had matched his playing to the instrument, to bring out its greatest potential, its particularity. Fleisher seemed to distill the beauty, drop by drop, like an alchemist, into flowing notes of an almost unbearable beauty-and, after this, there was nothing more to be said. — Oliver Sacks

Doubt filled her eyes. "What are we betting for, anyway?"

He hadn't thought about that, but it took his brain all of three seconds to come up with an answer. He knew damn well what he wanted from her. Had for years.

"A kiss." The words slipped from his lips before he could stop them, but once out, he didn't want to take them back. "One kiss after you come back and see she's all right. — J.M. Stewart

It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die. — Jostein Gaarder

it could take 30 years to build your reputation and yet it can be lost in 30 seconds. — Robin S. Sharma

Sometimes it takes ten seconds to see some humor in your dilemmas, sometimes ten years. — Allen Klein

If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. — Steve Jobs

God will forgive me. It's his job. Heine said this on his deathbed (1856). Hilarious. He must have thought that up years before and counted the seconds to use it. — Heinrich Heine

He interrupts her again. "I will stay without complaining ... "
"You have no choice!"
" ... if you'll do two things." The teasing has long left his face. He is dead serious.
I should leave but I can't. I know I'm about to witness a historic event, and I lurk next to the door, my eyes glued to Charlotte and Ambrose.
"Okay," Charlotte says, matching his gravity.
"Promise me you'll come back."
Charlotte is silent.
"And give me a kiss good-bye."
"What?" Charlotte blurts.
"You heard me."
She stands stock-still for a good couple of seconds before raising her fingertips to her mouth. Her eyes glitter with tears as she sits back down on the side of his bed. And taking his good hand in hers, she leans forward and kisses him. It is a slow kiss. It is a lingering kiss. It's the kiss she's been waiting for for years. — Amy Plum

I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost in. Yet, wait a moment. Television is not the only place where speeches are given. Some hundred thousand teachers teach every day. They all speak 45 minutes, more times a day. They have been doing this for years. Every teacher knows exactly when the time will be over and that by then his speech will need to come to a natural end. It is this tension that determines the success of a lesson. It is a sign of the times that we forget these daily achievements in education. A million students daily attend several 'live' lectures and this in secondary education alone. These are high ratings! — Robbert Dijkgraaf

trust takes years to build seconds to break and forever to repair — Paul Elbert

8:58 We go to McDonald's. The woman in front of me in line spends more than five seconds contemplating her order. This infuriates me, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?? MC-SEABASS?? IT'S THE GODDAMN MCDONALDS'S MENU, IT'S BEEN THE SAME FOR TEN YEARS! IT'S ALL MCSHIT!JUST ORDER! — Tucker Max

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this. — Stephen King

He brought the hammer down on the stake once more, and the blood that pulsed from Barlow's chest turned black.
Then, dissolution.
It came in the space of two seconds, too fast to ever be believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares, with awful stopmotion slowness. — Stephen King

Today we have more knowledge than at any other time in history. In seconds our laptops or PCs can call up information about a topic that would have taken years to collect. Young people graduate with more knowledge than ever before - but in spite of their knowledge, they are confused, bewildered, frustrated, and without moral moorings. — Billy Graham

I could start a war in 30 seconds. But some countries spend 100 years trying to find peace. Just like good manners, peace has to be learned. — Sylvester Stallone

If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds. But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short. — Robert Grudin