The Lost Time Accidents Quotes

“If you don't like the place where you find yourself, Waldemar, it pays to remember that you'll be somewhere else in just a moment. The place itself will be a different place.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“What then, is time?" asks the saint. "If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." Neither the past nor the future, argues Augustine, truly exists - and the present is merely an instant. "The present of things past is memory," he writes; "the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation." Augustine's conclusion - never fully stated, but unmistakably implied - is that time is subjective. It exists in the mind alone, and nowhere else.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“His crimped hair was subtly frosted, making him look like a preacher in some California church - the kind with acoustic guitars and headset microphones and not much use for the actual Bible.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“The present of things past is memory,” he writes; “the present of things present is perception; and the present of things future is expectation.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“Practically from birth - or so it seemed to him - he had been aware that the elegant, filigreed, eminently reasonable world around him was destined to collapse under its own weight, like some elaborate architectural folly; the obvious response, to any sensible observer, was to have as little to do with such a world as possible.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors' orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“Regardless of what he was doing, no matter how candid or innocuous the photo, Haven always looked as though he'd just stopped screaming.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED?
Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you've hoped for?
Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives - exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine! - but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being "spent," and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the marjority of cases, just the opposite.
If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended - it may be time to seek another maker.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“Trying to write, or talk—or think—without invoking time is like trying to make pancakes underwater. Time”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents

“If God had commanded Noah to build an ark for consumer goods instead of animals—and if Noah had been a drunken paranoiac—his ark might have resembled this apartment.”
― John Wray, The Lost Time Accidents