If you put any trust in proverbs, you already know that time heals, steals, and flies. And you're equally aware that time is something we all make and take, keep and save, spend, waste, and lose. Habitually, almost without thinking, we explain our relationship to time through metaphors--lots of different metaphors.
In More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 1989), George Lakoff and Mark Turner remind us that "Metaphor isn't just for poets; it's in ordinary language and is the principal way we have of conceptualizing abstract concepts like life, death, and time." So whether we're spending it or running out of it, we deal with time (and time deals with us) metaphorically.
Here, if you have the time to spare, are a dozen timely metaphors.
Time Is a Circus
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
(Ben Hecht)
Time Is a Thief
Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
Time is the thief you cannot banish.
These are my daughters, I suppose.
But where in the world did the children vanish?
(Phyllis McGinley, "Ballad of Lost Objects")
Time Is a Trap
But that's where I am, there's no escaping it. Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.
(Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale)
Time Is a Reef
Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked.
(Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit)
Time Is a Storm
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
(William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays)
Time Is a Stream
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)
Time Is a River
Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment.
(Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins)
Time Is a Ruined Bridge
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Concord Hymn")
Time Is the School and the Fire
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
(Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day")
Time Is a Prison
Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.
(Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory)
Time Is an Arrow
Time is an irreversible arrow, and we can never return to the self that we sloughed off in childhood or adolescence. The man trying to wear youth's carefree clothing, the woman costuming her emotions in doll's dresses--these are pathetic figures who want to reverse time's arrow.
(Joshua Loth Liebman, "Renunciation of Immaturity," Peace of Mind)
Time Is a Teacher
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
(Hector Berlioz)
Time is indeed a "versatile performer," as Franklin P. Jones once observed. "It flies, marches on, heals all wounds, runs out, and will tell."
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