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Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

— R. S. Thomas Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

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Time

More quotes by R. S. Thomas

Art is recuperation
from time. I lie back
convalescing upon the prospect
of a harvest already at hand.

Between Here and Now (1981)

You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.

The deep spaces between stars,
Fathomless as the cold shadow
His mind cast.

The Bread of Truth (1963)

The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.

Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

It is alive. It is you,
God. Looking out I can see
no death.

Laboratories of the Spirit (1975)

All R. S. Thomas quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.

Abraham Cowley Poems (1656)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: R. S. Thomas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.