Time Abyss/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


"In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1:1, The Bible

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I am the one which was, who is, and who is yet to come. I am the Almighty."
Revelation 1:8, also The Bible

Dean: So is this the part where you kill me?
Death: You have an inflated sense of your importance. To a thing like me, a thing like you, well... Think how you would feel if a bacterium sat at your table and started to get snarky. This is one little planet in one tiny solar system, in a galaxy that is barely out of its diapers. I'm old, Dean. Very old. So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you. [forks over some pizza] Eat.

Dean: I gotta ask, how old are you?

Death: As old as God, maybe older. Neither of us can remember anymore. Life/Death, Chicken/Egg - regardless: at the end, I reap him too.

Dean: God? You will reap God?

Death: Oh yes. God will die too, Dean.

Dean: Well, this is way above my pay grade.

Death: Just a bit.

Nebula Man: I have lived three billion years. I might have grown huge enough to replace the entire universe. But there is something in me that remains small.

Frankenstein: Let that be your epitaph.
I can remember when your language was nothing but quaint little grunts and and sneezes. That you will slaughtered at my leisure is a foregone conclusion. So, go ahead and run your chubby little heart out.
Before Shinka's walls were built, before the torii at Okina stood, she was there, tall and proud against the sky, and she will be there long after they have fallen into dust.
Ayumi, the Last Visitor, Magic: The Gathering

Ere iron was found or tree was hewn,
When young was mountain under moon;
Ere ring was made, or wrought was woe,

It walked the forests long ago.
Gandalf's Riddle of the Ents, The Lord of the Rings

The notes were painstakingly detailed, describing the origins of each [weapon], the name of the craftsmen, and in some cases, who had owned the particular dagger, sword, or spear over the span of centuries.

Remy found himself lost in the pages and time periods, remembering snippets of his own past when weapons such as these were carried with as much ease as a designer purse or ipod.
Dancing on the Head of a Pin, A Remy Chandler Novel
"Organic life is nothing more than a genetic mutation. An accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of evolution and existence. Before us, you are nothing."
Sovereign, Mass Effect

Sometimes the discovery becomes massive and everybody in the world finds out at once and I end up on a pedestal. Sometimes they make me their leader, sometimes they call me an abomination, sometimes I get arrested and studied, usually it's all of this at once. I've been everywhere. I've done everything, spoken every language, built a pyramid, survived re-entry. History goes in cycles. If you watch it for long enough you can see the tipping points coming and be there when they happen. I invented fire, the wheel, the electric motor, antibiotics, you name it, every era, every country. Fought in X number of wars. Once, I actually ruled the whole world.

I've walked on the Moon barefoot.
Anne Poole, Fine Structure
"I have seen thousands of millions of years, [Tavi]. In a time such as that, oceans swell and die away. Deserts become green farmlands. Mountains are ground to dust and valleys, and new mountains are born in fire. The earth itself flows like water, great ranges of land spinning and colliding, and the stars themselves spin and reel into new shapes. It is the great dance, Aleran, and the lifetime of your race is but a beat within a measure...In that time, I have seen the deaths of many things. Entire species come and go, like the sparks rising from a campfire."

Tenant: Are you claiming that your people have been on the surface for over ten million years?
Rod: Oh, my people have been down there for much longer than that. No, I was just talking about me, personally.
[[[Beat]]]

Rod: If your next question is about skin cream, save it for later.

Vog: Conversion between my time scale and your own standard Earth years isn't hard, but there are a lot of zeroes. Rounding may introduce as much as a one percent margin of error.
Reverend Theo: The margin of error in your guess at your own age is bigger than the age of my whole species.

Vog: Like I said, I am having trouble understanding your perspective.
I REMEMBER WHEN THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
—Azrael, the Death of Universes, Discworld
"Eldest, that's what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside."
Tom Bombadil, The Lord of the Rings
There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old. Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or a thousand, to be an unusual span. There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear. There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis. (The first Atlantis. The other lands that bore than name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, and they came later.) There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that pre-dated the great lizards. (There were a few; fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years.) There are roughly seventy people walking the Earth, human to all appearances (and in some cases, to all medical tests currently available) who were alive before the Earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust. How well do you know your friends, your neighbours, your lovers? Walk the streets of any city and stare carefully at the people who pass you, and know this: They are there too. The old ones.
You know, I've been here for a very long time. I remember many things. I remember being on a shore-line, watching a little grey fish heave itself up on the beach. And an older brother saying "Don't step on that fish, Castiel. Big plans for that fish." I remember the Tower of Babel - all 37 feet of it, which I suppose was impressive at the time. And when it fell, they howled "Divine wrath!" But come on... dried dung can only be stacked so high. I remember Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Sodom and Gomorrah.
My name is Luru Parz. I was born in AD 5279, as humans once counted Time. Now I have lived so long that such dates have no meaning. We have lost the years, lost them in orders of magnitude.
—Luru Parz, Resplendent
Huh, what a brat. Little children like you have no way to stand a chance against me, an eternal being. Your history of scarlet... Divided by my history, the result is zero. To an eternal one, your existence is but an instant.
—Eirin Yagokoro, Imperishable Night[1]
It all started when your universe was created in a Big Bang. At this time, our civilization was already 17 years old. Everything was fine for the first millisecond. Then, a race of giant floating brains showed up, and they have been trying to destroy all thought in the universe to this day.
—Unnamed Nibblonian, Futurama
I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains on the other side of an enormous deep valley that was shadowed by the setting sun. This was before they were separated from the continent by the rising seas as the glacier was melting.
John Oldman, The Man From Earth

Byrne: I miss the days when you didn't have to lather yourself with this stuff. [2]
Adam: You mean before people knew about the dangers of overexposure to the sun?

Byrne: No, I mean before there was a sun.
Mr. Young
"I was old when the molecules of your world joined and called themselves land, and sea, and fish, and man."
Lorien, Babylon 5
"For a trillion years I was fine with my job as stamp collector. Then I saw the Big Bang, and I realized how lonely I was."
Yivo, Futurama
  1. One must note that the "little child" in question is a vampire who happens to be somewhere around 500 years old
  2. sunscreen