Time and Again Quotes

“Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“Would you have references?"
"I'm awfully sorry but I haven't. I just arrived in New York, and don't know a soul. Except you." I smiled but she didn't smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, "It's true that I'm an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I'm neat.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“It was an ordinary day, a Friday, twenty minutes til lunchtime, five hours til quitting time and the weekend, ten months til vacation, thirty-seven years til retirement. Then the phone rang.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radio-active fallout that put poison into our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we’re used to it.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“Set flush in the wall behind the desk was a steel door. It was knobless, and along one edge were three brass keyholes spaced a few inches apart. Rube brought out a key ring, selected a key, then walked around the desk, inserted the key in the topmost lock, and turned it. From his watch pocket he took a single key, pushed it into the middle keyhole, and turned. The guard stood waiting beside him, and now the guard inserted a key in the bottom keyhole, turned it and pulled the door open with the key. Rube removed his two keys and gestured me in through the open door before him. He followed, and the door swung solidly shut behind us. I heard the multiple click of the locks engaging, and we were standing in a space hardly larger than a big closet, dimly lighted by an overhead bulb in a wire cage. Then I saw that we were at the top of a circular metal staircase.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician’s who made a decision of profound consequence.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“Because I’ve always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don’t need to explain; maybe you’ll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“inserted”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“crysake?”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“Wir sind Menschen, die die Luft, die wir atmen, verpesten. Und die Flüsse. Wir zerstören die großen Seen; der Eriesee ist bereits tot, und nun beginnen wir mit den Meeren. Wir füllen die Atmosphäre mit radioaktivem Niederschlag und vergiften die Knochen unserer Kinder. Und wir wissen das alles. Wir stellen Raketen her, die innerhalb weniger Minuten die gesamte Menschheit auslöschen können; sie sind bereits auf ihre Ziele gerichtet und bereit, abgefeuert zu werden. Wir haben endlich die Kinderlähmung besiegt, und dann entwickelte die U.S. Army neue Bakterienstämme, die unheilbare Krankheiten verursachen. Wir hatten die Möglichkeit, den Schwarzen in Amerika Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen, und als sie sie einforderten, widersetzten wir uns. In Asien haben wir Menschen lebend verbrannt. Wir erlauben, dass in den Vereinigten Staaten Kinder unterernährt aufwachsen. Wir erlauben, dass Leute Geld damit verdienen, indem sie auf unseren Fernsehkanälen unsere Kinder zum Rauchen überreden, obwohl wir wissen, welche Folgen das hat. Wir leben in einer Zeit, in der es immer schwieriger wird, sich einzureden, welch gute Menschen wir nach wie vor sind. Wir hassen uns gegenseitig. Und wir haben uns daran gewöhnt.”
― Jack Finney, Time and Again

“and—we’re all actors by instinct, hams from birth—she”
― Jack Finney, Time And Again