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Time Travel Quotes

Browse 737 quotes about Time Travel.

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Time Travel Quotes

“Are you done briefing the company yet?" "We, um... Haven't gotten through the introductions yet." "Allow me: Time-traveling Kevyn Andreyasn, this is the mercenary company "Tagon's Toughs." "Company, this is the time-traveling Kevyn Andreyasn, who will have become your captain thirty-two hours from now, as of seven weeks ago. Now, quick. Let's go save the galaxy while they're confused.”

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Book:Resident Mad Scientist
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“Suddenly, a spiral of lightning snaked across the frowning sky and struck Ray and Ilsa. In a spectacular flash, they vanished. An earth-shattering bang of thunder knocked over all the FBI agents. Ilsa’s file of genealogical records flew into the air. The thoroughly singed pages flew down the street, twisting in the frantic breeze. The bullhorn fell from the limp fingers of Agent Schweppes’ hand. The rain began to fall like bullets.”

LoveHumourRevolutionAgentsComicTime TravelFbiParodyPerishWrongly Accused
Book:The Duke of D.C.: The American Dream
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“I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton--go figure. My mother was called Wednesday, but was born on a Sunday--I don't know why--and my father had no name at all--his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me...”

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Book:The Eyre Affair
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“Bridgeport, Wis. July 11, 1987 I write this letter to myself, so that the postmark may prove beyond controversy the day and year that it was written, and I shall not open it but shall place it among my effects against the day when someone, a member of my own family, God willing, may open it and read. And reading, know the thing that I believe and think, but dare not say while I am still alive, lest someone call me touched. For I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next. I have no morbid fear of death, nor any sentimental wish to gain the brief immortality that a thought accorded me after I am dead may give me, for the thought itself will be a fleeting one and the one who holds it himself will not have too many years of life, for the years of man are short . . . far too short for any perfect understanding of any of the problems that a lifetime poses. While it is more than likely that this letter will be read by my immediate descendants, who are well acquainted with me, I am still aware that through some vagary of fate it may fall yet unopened into the hands of someone many years after I am long forgotten, or even into the hands of strangers. Feeling that the circumstance which I have to tell is of more than ordinary interest, even at the risk of reporting something which may be well known to the one who reads this letter, I shall here include some of the basic facts about myself and my locality and situation.”

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Book:Time and Again
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“What a joyful adventure!”

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Book:Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
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“I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been having these weird dreams like every single night for three weeks now where I'm being contacted. Not by ghosts, exactly, but people from other histories, where things turned out differently than they did here. And they're all envious. And they all say: You are so lucky. You live in the best of all possible worlds. And you don't even know it.”

DreamsTime TravelGhostsDexter PalmerVersion ControlParallel LivesAlternate UniverseAlternate Universes
Book:Version Control
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“Very soon you will find yourself at the end of a dirt road, only inches from a threshold . . . a threshold into another world—a glorious world, one of infinite possibility. You’ll be standing there contemplating your next move when a gust of wind whispers, “Have faith.” When you hear those magic words, it’ll be time for you to cross the threshold and begin your journey . . .”

Time TravelLiterary FictionMagical RealismDreams And RealityComing Of Age NovelJourney Of Self DiscoveryGhost StoryVisionary FictionTransformation Of ConsciousnessVisionary Inspirational
Book:A Hero Dreams
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“She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was silly. Or had she? Had she knocked on the door of her home to see a younger version of herself answer; had there been a mutual shock of recognition (as the younger Rebecca realized that, yes, her husband's work was due to be a success, that he was not wasting his time chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills); had she slipped her arm into that of her past self (feeling a slight electric tingle as skin touched skin and a taste in her mouth as if she'd touched a nine-volt battery to her tongue) and said, We need to to talk? Had she sat in a coffee shop, conversing with a woman who everyone assumed was related to her in some way—Oh my god you two are so cute, you're mother and daughter but you look like sisters? Had she made some kind of idle remark overheard by a man on his way to spend two weeks' vacation in North Dakota; had that comment convinced that man to settle there permanently instead, and to contact those who had political sympathies similar to his own? Had that unknown man begun the slow process of taking over the state by placing his allies in the local governments if he could? Had that strategy failed, leaving brute force as a regrettable last resort?”

What IfTime TravelDexter PalmerRipple EffectVersion ControlButterfly Effect
Book:Version Control
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“The device,' Philip said. 'What are you going to do with it?' 'I know how this sounds. But you'll have to trust us. We'll take possession of it. We're going to dismantle it; when we do so, the wormhole will close, making this the final version of history we live through. Then we're going to box up the device and forget about it. Lose it somewhere; burn the records. It'll end up in a warehouse right next to the Ark of Covenant.”

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Book:Version Control
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“People from the military have been inside that thing. If I went back in time, I wouldn't necessarily be thinking geopolitically, but maybe they would. That has to be half the reason why they're funding us in the first place. Maybe there were earlier versions of history where Republicans didn't vote to pulp all those Andrew Jackson twenties and replace them with bills that had portraits of Reagan. Maybe in the first version of post-Point Zero history, insurgents in North and South Dakota didn't attempt to secede; maybe we weren't fighting enemies both here and in the Middle East. Or maybe there was a full-on civil war going on in the United States and the current state of affairs is an improvement. We don't know. We can't know. And we can't know the extent to which any of us, sitting here at this table, is responsible.”

Time TravelDexter PalmerVersion ControlAlternate Histories
Book:Version Control
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“But we think that if a human were to violate conventional causality—' 'By time traveling—' 'Please, please don't call it that. If a human were to violate causality, the experience from her point of view would be similar. You would act while in the past, but not be able to recall your actions later, because that period of time for you would be lost between histories: the old one you left and the new one to which you would return. It would exist outside of the normal course of events. It would be, in a very real sense, lost time.”

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Book:Version Control
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“But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an attempt to create the best of all possible worlds. I cannot bear this cold mathematician's God who sees all the universe as nothing more than an elaborate problem to be solved. Such a world is a world with no meaning, one in which one history is no more or less preferable to any other.”

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Book:Version Control
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“The scientific method entails two assumptions that are so basic that, even if you spell them out, they are still difficult to keep in mind. First: that the observer stays the same while the world changes. Second: that cause precedes effect. But the very nature of the experiment we are conducting means that the second of these assumptions is thrown into doubt. We are deliberately attempting to engineer an event in which effect chronologically precedes cause. If one of these assumptions is under threat, why not the other?”

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Book:Version Control
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“You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree—that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesn't just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root that's back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch.”

Time TravelScientific TheoryDexter PalmerMultiverseVersion ControlAlternate Universe
Book:Version Control
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“What we are proposing,' Alicia said, 'is that the laws of physics are such that causality violation is subject to a form of version control, one that prevents a forking of history. That instead of causality violation creating an alternate universe, one version of history is outright overwritten by another. One past is replaced with another future. Which means that the memories of the past of the people in that future are replaced with memories of a different past.' Carson interrupted. 'Including the memories of any—' 'Purely hypothetical—' '—time travelers.' 'So take our time traveler from the traditional story,' Carson continued. 'He leaves his utopian future for the past. He kills the butterfly. The Magna Carta is never written. He returns to the dystopian future that his misstep created. But he doesn't see it as a dystopia: he sees it as home, the world he grew up in, the world he left to go back in time. Because he doesn't remember that first future, and has no other world to which he can compare this one. Maybe he even sees it as a utopia. Maybe everyone does. Maybe everyone in this dark place believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds.”

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“Then you would have acted to change history, but you would have replaced one history with another. You would not be able to know what past version of history you would have altered, because that history would never have happened. Nor would you be able to know what you had done in the past, or that you had done anything at all in the past, or that you had even been to the past. You would not be able to compare histories in your mind; if you entered the causality violation device knowing this, then you would realize that you would be trading one set of memories for another, and that there would never be any evidence, in your mind or in the world, that you had done this.”

Time TravelScientific TheoryDexter PalmerVersion ControlAlternate Histories
Book:Version Control
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“She closed her eyes, and as had been her habit over these past couple of days, she began to imagine possible past histories and what she might have done to change them into the new one in which she lived, either inadvertently, or out of a misguided attempt to play God and make the world a better place, or, worse, with malice aforethought. Any time she spent in the past would have been clipped out of history, as neatly as if it had never happened, because it hadn't happened.”

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“That's one of our speculations, by the way. That the prior version of history that this one overwrote was horrible. Complete geopolitical mayhem; half of New York City is underwater. The United States is headed toward civil war, or ruled by an artificial-intelligence construct, or some such other thing. Real end-of-days stuff. That the instances of ourselves who existed in that history figured out what we have: that the invention of the causality violation device was the cause. That in that prior version of history, Rebecca did not die in a car accident. That she went back to the past on a mission, as a volunteer, well aware of her sacrifice.”

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Book:Version Control
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