A Literary Prescription for

Time

For the one thing we can never get back, and the quiet art of noticing it while we can.

Time is the strangest of our companions: always with us, never quite grasped, and the one thing we can never get back. We race through it, wish it away, mourn its passing, and only rarely stop to feel its weight and its wonder. Yet how we spend our hours is, in the end, how we spend our lives. These books and poems are for waking up to time, for feeling its swift, mysterious passage, and for the quiet resolve to notice the hours while we still have them to notice.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Some of these are luminous inquiries into what time actually is, and some are novels that let you feel its strangeness, its brevity and its weight. Non-fiction and fiction together, they share one waking purpose: to lift us out of our half-blind rush through the hours, and remind us how precious, and how fleeting, they are.

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli · 2017

The physicist Carlo Rovelli writes about time with the soul of a poet, exploring how it works, why it flows the way it seems to, and what that means for how we live. Short, beautiful and mind-expanding, it makes the deepest physics feel intimate and human. A gorgeous read for anyone who has ever wondered what time really is.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Audrey Niffenegger · 2003

Niffenegger’s inventive, heartbreaking novel follows a man who travels involuntarily through time and the woman who loves him across the scattered years. It is a moving meditation on presence, longing and the ache of never having quite enough time together. A beautiful read for anyone who has loved against the clock.

Life After Life

Kate Atkinson · 2013

Atkinson’s dazzling novel gives its heroine life after life, each one lived a little differently, as a way of asking what a single existence, and a single choice, really weighs. Ingenious and deeply moving, it plays with time to illuminate how we live. A brilliant, absorbing read for anyone fascinated by the roads not taken.

How to Stop Time

Matt Haig · 2017

Haig’s tender novel follows a man who ages so slowly he has lived for centuries, and finds that a near-endless life brings not peace but a longing to truly live in the present. Warm and wise, it turns out to be a book about now. A moving, hopeful read about why the passing of time is precisely what makes it precious.

Tuck Everlasting

Natalie Babbitt · 1975

Babbitt’s exquisite short novel imagines a family who can never die, and a girl who must decide whether endless life is a gift or a curse. Deceptively simple and quietly profound, it says more about time and mortality than books ten times its length. A perfect, luminous read for any age about why an ending is what gives life its meaning.

The Hours

Michael Cunningham · 1998

Cunningham weaves together three women across the twentieth century, each living a single, ordinary, extraordinary day. It is a gorgeous meditation on how much a life is held within its passing hours, and on the weight of an ordinary day. A luminous, Pulitzer-winning read for anyone drawn to the depth hidden inside a single day.

Poems about time

For the passing hours

from “To His Coy Mistress”

Andrew Marvell, c.1650

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
…But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Marvell’s great poem contains the most famous image of time in English verse: that winged chariot forever hurrying at our backs. Beneath the seduction is an urgent, universal truth, that our hours are numbered, so we had better live them. A thrilling reminder to stop hesitating and seize the time you have.

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from “The Paradox of Time”

Austin Dobson, 1877

Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go;
Or else, were this not so,
What need to chain the hours,
For Youth were always ours?

Dobson turns the usual complaint on its head with quiet brilliance: it is not time that flees, but we who are carried past it. The wisdom lands gently and stays with you. A deft, thoughtful poem for anyone who feels the years slipping and wants to understand, exactly, what is slipping and what remains.

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“Ozymandias”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains.

Shelley’s perfect sonnet shows time doing its patient, humbling work: a mighty king’s empire reduced to a broken statue and endless sand. It is the ultimate reminder that time outlasts everything we build. A magnificent, sobering poem to keep close whenever your own worries start to feel too large.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about time to keep

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Leo Tolstoy

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Lost time is never found again.

Benjamin Franklin

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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard

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Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today.

Mother Teresa

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You cannot save time, only spend it. So spend it on what you would not want to have missed.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Coming into the present

A calming practice for stepping out of the rush and into the softness of the present moment, and an essay on the way a little daily gratitude helps you notice, and keep, your fleeting hours.

Mindfulness Meditation: Stillness, Softness and Space

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A calming guided practice for stepping out of the hurry of the hours and settling into the still, spacious present, the only place time is ever actually lived.

Listen Now For Free

How a Gratitude Journal Changed My Life

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On the simple practice of noticing what is good, and how paying attention to your days is the surest way not to let them slip past unlived.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Time

Where should I start?

Start with Four Thousand Weeks’s quieter cousin, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, a short, beautiful meditation on what time actually is, and why it feels the way it does. And if you would rather a story, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a moving novel about love stretched across the years. The poems below are some of the finest ever written about time’s swift, strange passing.

What can I read about time and its passing?

Books that make you feel time rather than merely measure it. Life After Life and How to Stop Time play with its strangeness, while The Hours and Tuck Everlasting explore, tenderly, what a single day or an endless life really means. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep below. Time is the one thing we can never get back, which is exactly why it is worth thinking about.

Which quotes about time are worth keeping?

Quotes worth keeping include “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” (William Penn), “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” (Leo Tolstoy) and “Lost time is never found again.” (Benjamin Franklin). You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really change how I feel about time?

It genuinely can. We spend most of our days half-blind to time, racing through it or wishing it away, until a book stops us and makes us feel its weight and its wonder. The great writers on time do not solve it, but they wake us up to it, and a person awake to time tends to waste less of it. These pages are an invitation to notice the hours while you still have them.

Time

Prescribed reading

For the passing hours

Quotes about time to keep

Coming into the present

Reading for Time

Where should I start?

What can I read about time and its passing?

Which quotes about time are worth keeping?

Can reading really change how I feel about time?

More prescriptions await.