“Those days when our watch sees to take lazy age over each minute, and there is always so much time left, so little passed, since the last time you looked. And then at the end, when you're suddenly nervous and want to back out, the time goes in a rush and it's now.”

“When we’re young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren’t that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I’ve never much minded this myself.”

“Then Elrond and Galadriel rode on; for the Third Age was over and the Days of the Rings were passed and an end was come of the story and song of those times.”

“It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.”

“I've known time to stretch out like rings expanding outward over water; I've also known it to rush by with such force it leaves me dizzy. But until today I've never known it to do both at the same time. The minutes seem to swell around me, to stifle me with their sluggishness... At the same time. I'm terrified when I see how many hours have gone by... and even as each minute seems to take an hour, each hour seems to fly by in a minute.”

“In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.”