He that taketh this crystal, so, in his hand, at night, and wishes, saying ‘At a certain hour let it be’; the hour comes and he will go back eight, ten, even twelve years if he will, into the past, and do a thing again, or act otherwise than he did. The day passes; the ten years are accomplished once again; he is here once more; but he is what he might have become had he done that one thing otherwise. 

 Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. 

 Twelve of them I counted, twelve ships in a fleet. Men of war? Surely not—not men of war. Men of war in this day do not carry sail. And yet—merchantmen? Merchantmen do not go to sea in peace times in groups of twelve. 

 “Perhaps I ought to explain,” he continued. “You see, I’m a clockwork man.” 

 Autumn had passed into winter before I mustered courage to get into communication with the Being to whom I had previously had recourse. 

 If he did meet Savile, he was prepared to shake hands with him in the old way, and to realize what a neurotic fool he had been: also that Destiny had made an idiot of itself with the careless blundering born of the knowledge that nobody would ever know, nobody, that is, except himself; and, of course, Destiny safely relied on the assumption that nobody would believe him. 

 Nie zapominajcie, że to Francuzi, najwaleczniejszy naród europejski, że to są ludzie, których brawura i dzielność oślepia.

[Do not forget that the French, bravest among all the European nationalities, are a people blinded by their very own braggadocio and past prowess.] 

 “Time,” said George, “why I can give you a definition of time. It’s what keeps everything from happening at once.” 

—from the opening line of the book, although Cummings wrote a similar line in Chapter 5 of his earlier work, The Girl in the Golden Atom (in the same setting of the Scientific Club), which had no time travel, but only different rates of time passage.

 It’s true enough, what they’ve told you, as far as we can tell it. As to theories of time and space, I know no more than you do. I used to think they were obvious. I’ve heard the Professor talk two nights a week for three years, and I’ve realised that it isn’t all quite as simple as it seemed, though I don’t get much further. But the next room’s a fact. We lay things down on the central slab, and the room goes dark, and we go back in two minutes, and it gets light again, and they’re still there. And the Professor says he’s projected them 500,000 years ahead in the interval, and they don’t look any the worse for the journey. 

 A cat can’t live nowadays—turn me back to a better age, just for a day. 

 I know I love you, Ken! But today—during the marriage service—something seemed to reach out of the Past that made me—afraid!