Man and Time Quotes

“I was surrounded, and often enchanted, it appeared, by nothings.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“Time must be tracked down in the inner world ... It is one of the peculiarities of Time that it is intensely private and yet also widely shared.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“This looking at life properly, with no nonsense about you, and becoming a level-headed fellow, might be compared to attendance at a rather strange movie theatre. In there you are told to concentrate entirely upon the images shown on the screen. These are your world, your life. What is not shown on the screen ... is nothing. But you cannot help feeling that there is perhaps something else, not on the screen. Perhaps you hear a voice that is not coming from there and is much closer to your ear ... There are whispers and movements in the dark. Apparently there is a life all around you, not like the clear and ordinary imagery of the screen - a life fragmentary, mysterious, only to be guessed at, but somehow suggesting a fullness and richness of living not to be found in the existence of the lighted images. Indeed, this screen existence is beginning to seem repetitive and tedious; but one of its hollow-brass voices ... says that you have only to wait, taking care not to addle your wits with nothings ... But if you listen hard, another voice ... so close that it might be inside your head, whispers that what you are being told with such authority and complacency is nonsense, that the life around you in front of the screen is real and enduring, and that your nothings have always been SOMETHING.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“what if Time is not as simple as most people now imagine it to be? ... Suppose we are sentenced not to death, to sleep and forgetting, but to life ... ?”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“moments make up our lives ... if we are shaping a self that will survive death in some form or other, then our existence in passing time, moment by moment, does not become less important but more important”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time

“Nowadays, it is true, we have mass media and expert propaganda to spread suspicion and fear. But the people I mean—and they form the great majority—are not suspicious and fearful, as many educated and more influential persons are. Propaganda has not made them accept the Bomb. We protesters, though we may have won over some of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, have not made them reject it. They remain profoundly, astonishingly, shockingly indifferent.”
― J.B. Priestley, Man and Time