"We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are the eternity and you are the mirror."
— Kahlil Gibrán (The Prophet)

"In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke."
— Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf)

"On Eternity:
I mean, d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird-"
"What little bird?" said Aziraphale suspiciously.
"This little bird I'm talking about. And every thousand years-"
"The same bird every thousand years?"
Crowley hesitated. "Yeah," he said.
"Bloody ancient bird, then."
"Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-"
"-limps-"
"flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-"
"Hold on. You can't do that. Between here and the end of the universe there's loads of-" The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. "Loads of buggerall, dear boy."
"But it gets there anyway," Crowley persevered.
"How?"
"It doesn't matter!"
"It could use a space ship," said the angel.
Crowley subsided a bit. "Yeah," he said. "If you like. Anyway, this bird-"
"Only it is the end of the universe we're talking about," said Aziraphale. "So it'd have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you've got to-" He hesitated. "What have
they got to do?"
"Sharpen its beak on the mountain," said Crowley. "And then it flies back-"
"-in the space ship-"
"And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again," said Crowley quickly.
There was a moment of drunken silence,
"Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak," mused Aziraphale.
"Listen," said Crowley urgently, "the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-"
Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds' beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.
"-then you still won't have finished watching The Sound of Music."
Aziraphale froze.
"And you'll enjoy it," Crowley said relentlessly. "You really will."
"My dear boy-"
"You won't have a choice."
"Listen"
"Heaven has no taste."
"Now-"
"And not one single sushi restaurant."
A look of pain crossed the angel's suddenly very serious face."
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"No, mademoiselle, I would not like to see the children's menu. I have no doubt that the children's menu itself tastes better than the meals on it. I would like to order ? la carte. Or don't you serve fish to minors?"
— Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code)

"Anger at lies lasts forever. Anger at truth can't last."
— Greg Evans

"There is nothing more important than your eternal salvation."
— Kirk Cameron

"There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before..."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"there won't be any pain, he promised. Only an eternity together. Come back to me. (Stanton, book #5)"
— Lynne Ewing

"Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.

The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?

I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.

So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.

You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.

I miss you dreadfully!"
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."
— Graham Greene

"The woods are never solitary--they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity."
— L.M. Montgomery (Kilmeny of the Orchard)

"In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faëry lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things that are unseen are eternal."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of the Island)

""The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.""
— Cicero

"Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality of whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered to them. "
— C.S. Lewis

"The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience."
— Joseph Campbell

"I've gone to prepare a place for you
But I will come back again."
— Various (Holy Bible: Nestle-aland Novum Testamentum Graece)

"This is eternity, Antanasia," he said, both warning and imploring. "Eternity.""
— Beth Fantaskey Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

"As soon as he was gone, we opened, "Baucis and Philemon." An elderly couple living in a cottage, they're granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, "May one hour take us both away; let neither outlive the other." The wish is granted.

I said, "Simultaneous deaths? Why didn't they wish for eternal happiness instead? What else would anyone wish for?"

"They did wish for that," answered Jamie."
— David Guterson (The Other)

"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith."
— Robert Ingersoll

"...the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered...He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is."
— Gregory Maguire (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister)

"I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable…has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe."
— T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn)

"Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity."
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him.
And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?"
— The Vampire Lestat

"The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"When you said forever, I thought you meant till we die, but I guess forever isn't as long as it once was...
"
— STG

"Eternity, I had laughed in it's face before it came and made the hell sure i would stay alive forever. After i was damned to Eternity i thought not even you could help me feel normal again."
— Olivia and Friends

"...[God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time, which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure."
— C.S. Lewis

"I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death... . I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the Eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"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

"The last shall come first and the first shall come last"
— Various

"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man."
— William Blake

"On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it."
— Jean Paul

"The reality of the Life Review is becoming part of our every day understanding. We know that after death, we have to look at our lives again; and we’re going to agonize over every missed opportunity, over every case in which we failed to act. This knowledge is contributing to our determination to pursue every intuitive image that comes to mind, and keep it firmly in awareness. We’re living life in a more deliberate way. We don’t want to miss a single important event. We don’t want the pain of looking back later and realizing that we blew it, that we failed to make the right decisions."
— James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision)

"…Those who’ve marred their appearance in any way by their actions in life aren’t forced to witness that marring. If they were, they’d become self-conscious and be unable to concentrate on improving themselves."
— Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come)