Time Travel Quotes

“There is no getting into the future except by waiting.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time. (Eric Frank Russell, 1941)”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“If you could take one ride in a time machine, which way would you go? The future or the past? Sally forth or turn back?...Do you prefer the costumed pageant of history or the techno-marvels to come? It seems there are two kinds of people. Both camps have their optimists as well as their pessimists. Disease is a worry. Time traveling while black or female poses special hazards. Then again, some people see ways to make money at lotteries, stock markets, and racetracks. Some just want to relive past loves. Many back travelers are driven by regret—mistakes made, opportunities lost.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art. Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn't. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“China’s official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history—“casually”
― James Gleick, Time Travel

“You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“The time capsule is a characteristically twentieth-century invention: a tragicomic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits. It sends our cultural bits and bobs traveling into the future at snail's pace. At our pace, that is. They travel through time in parallel with the rest of us, at our standard velocity of one second per second, one day per day... Builders of time capsules are projecting something forward into the future, but it's mainly their own imaginations. Like people who buy lottery tickets for the momentary dreams of riches, they get to dream of a time to come when, though long dead, they will be the cynosure of all eyes... Clear the airwaves: Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, Oglethorpe University, AD 1936, has something to say.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Hugo Gernsback invented pulp magazines and the grandfather paradox. Not bad for a charlatan.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“So was the Buddha (as translated via Borges): “The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live.” We”
― James Gleick, Time Travel

“You can say Einstein discovered that the universe is a four-dimensional space-time continuum. But it’s better to say, more modestly, Einstein discovered that we can describe the universe as a four-dimensional space-time continuum and that such a model enables physicists to calculate almost everything, with astounding exactitude, in certain limited domains”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“In physics there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a principle. The world is more complex than any model... The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the universe.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.

Steven Wright”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end. But if you believe in an interventionist god, what does that leave for him to do? A changeless being is hard for us mortals to imagine. Does he act? Does he even think? Without sequential time, thought—a process—is hard to imagine. Consciousness requires time, it seems. It requires being in time. When we think, we seem to think consecutively, one thought leading to another, in timely fashion, forming memories all the while. A god outside of time would not have memories. Omniscience doesn’t require them.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe.”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History

“poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, at”
― James Gleick, Time Travel: A History