Time is not like pocket money that you can spend, because time is the person spending the pocket money and the pocket money is you

The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn't talk about that love… because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love […] There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.

I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It's a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.

Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.

History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

This was the species whose main excuse for not doing something was 'if only I had more time'. Perfectly valid until you realised they did have more time. Not eternity, granted, but they had tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after the day after tomorrow. In fact I would have to write 'the day after' thirty thousand times before a final 'tomorrow' in order to illustrate the amount of time on a humans hands.

I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky... But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren't we?