Chronology Quotes

“By freeze-framing the image of our lifestyle, by stopping our mental clock at times and letting time flow, 'psychological' time can replace 'chronological' time and our human condition can be called into question. This opens the door to a new challenge and a new future. ( "Svp "Arrêt sur image" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“From the chronology of our time perception we keep garnering fetching and enticing instants of our life story, still abounding in our mind. As they emerge like lucky sparkles of our unyielding awareness, we hold them dearly in the treasury of our remembrance. ("Just for a moment")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.”
― STEPHANE AUDEGUY, The Theory of Clouds

“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]

My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]”
― Peter O'Donnell

“The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.”
― John Barbour

“Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918

“Today I am feeling that chronological order is not a good thing, even if it is easier, and that I should break it up. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?”
― Lydia Davis, The End of the Story

“Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable, or unapproachable. It is all of these things.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners

“Not-withstanding the fact that cutting granite with copper chisels is an impossibility, Egyptologists have asserted that the pyramid builders predated the Bronze Age, and, therefore, were limited in their choice of metals with which to make their tools. Therefore, they say that copper was the only metal that the ancient Egyptians used to fashion the stones with which they built the Great Pyramid. They say this while evidence of prehistoric iron—proving that the ancient Egyptians had developed and used it when building the Great Pyramid—is in the keeping of the British Museum. The discoverers of this piece of iron go to great lengths to argue for and document its authenticity, as John and Morton Edgar point out in their book Great Pyramid Passages.
[…]
Despite the [...] testimonials, because the chronology for the development of metals did not include wrought iron in the age of the pyramids, the specialists at the British Museum concluded that this wrought-iron artifact could not be genuine and must have been introduced in modern times.
[…]
The profession as a whole has been unable to cope with the idea of a piece of wrought iron being contemporary with the Great Pyramid. Such a notion goes completely against the grain of every preconception that Egyptologists internalize throughout their careers concerning the ways in which civilizations evolve and develop.
[…]
Egyptologists have a vested interest in continuing their teachings as they have taught them for the past century. To do otherwise would be to admit that they have been wrong. The iron plate is just a small, though significant, item in a large collection of anomalies that have been ignored or misinterpreted by many academics because they contradict their orthodox beliefs.”
― Christopher Dunn, The Giza Power Plant : Technologies of Ancient Egypt

“I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird's life expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot understand, at least not yet. is it possible that some people, too, experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow within and around them?”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“If Time Never Flew by Stewart Stafford

If a horologist froze time at dusk,
And there was no day or night,
Or days, months, and years,
What then for Earth’s masters?

Winged time stilled in a bell jar,
A castaway preserved in aspic,
Or stickily-entombed in amber,
Statuesque life an infinite daymare.

Boredom creeping up slowly,
A lockdown without progress,
The horologist would thaw time,
Freeing reality’s ebb and flow.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I make no apologies for lack of chronology in my reminiscences, as one incident recalls another, so I put it down.”
― Édith Piaf, Edith Piaf: The Wheel of Fortune: The Official Autobiography