“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
Annie Dillard
more infosource: The Writing Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 32.
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category: schedule, structure, time
medium: Nonfiction
via: Austin Kleon“I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.”
Michael Bierut
more infosource: interview in How to Think Like a Graphic Designer, by Debbie Millman (New York: Allworth Press, 2007), 12.
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category: calendar, graphic design, perspective, time, work
medium: Interview
“In one of his poems, George Chapman, Shakespeare’s contemporary, compares time to a pollinating honeybee and the world to a flower garden, declaring strangely that ‘time’s golden thigh upholds the flowery body of the earth.’ He explains that when we use time correctly it brings harmony and legitimacy to life. The verse ends with an aphorism: ‘The use of time is fate.’ The phrase is inscribed on my workroom door. It’s in front of me now, in the flickering sunlight glancing off the river. The Use of Time Is Fate.”
David Esterly
more infosource: The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 53.
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category: fate, school of life, time
medium: Memoir
“To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
Henry David Thoreau
more infosource: “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” in Walden (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1910), 117.
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medium: Nonfiction
“Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects. It’s very difficult nowadays to be alone because we all own watches. Have you even seen a saint with a watch? Yet, I’ve looked everywhere for one even amidst the saints known as patrons of the watchmakers.”
Pablo Picasso
more infosource: Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. by Dore Ashton (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 84.
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category: creative process, introvert, painter, solitude, time
medium: Nonfiction
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
Vita Sackville-West
more infosource: Selections from Twelve Days (1928), in Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings, ed. by Mary Ann Caws (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 125.
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category: creativity, documentation, time, writing
medium: nonfiction
via: this excellent Telegraph article written by Tilda Swinton“Gently, Years, Gently!”
Ralph Hodgson
more infosource: “Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 75.
medium: Poetry
“Let’s understand that things are thieves of time because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.”
Paul Hawken
more infosource: The 11th Hour, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen; distributed by Warner Independent Pictures; and released August 2007.
category: consumerism, economy, materialism, time
medium: Film
“What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don’t understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.”
Eero Saarinen
more infosource: said to a journalist, February 14, 1953, in Eero Saarinen on His Work, Aline Saarinen, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 9.
category: architecture, journalism, time
medium: Nonfiction
“Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.”
Eudora Welty
more infosource: One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 84.
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category: documentation, photography, snapshot, time
medium: Memoir
“My ideal state as a reader when I’m reading other people is feeling I’m vaguely wasting my time when I’m not reading that novel.”
Ian McEwan
more infosource: Interview by Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010.
medium: Interview
via: The Writer's Almanac“After school we were on our own, we had our friends, we went out on the cliffs with my dog, and we were free.”
Jane Goodall
more infosource: on how she spent time as a child, “Jane Goodall, Illustrated,” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
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category: childhood, dog, freedom, time
medium: Interview
“I turned five 50 years ago.”
Lynda Barry
more infosource: “Lynda Barry in search of the image world,” The Boston Phoenix, interview by S.I. Rosenbaum, April 13, 2011.
category: aging, cartoonist, time
medium: Interview
via: Austin Kleon's tumblr“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”
Daniel Hillis
more infosource: quoted on the Long Now Foundation’s website, a cultural institution focused on promoting “slower/better” thinking and providing a counterpoint to our current “faster/cheaper” mind-set.
category: clock, future, Stonehenge, time
medium: Website
“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: “The American Scholar,” in The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, Compensation (New York: American Book Company, 1911), 42.
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category: era, human condition, technology, time
medium: nonfiction
notes: epigraph to Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers
time