The future comes slowly, the present flies and the past stands still forever.

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them... there is nothing.

Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.

How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.

How time seemed to blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body.

I had no future either, not because it existed somewhere else but because I couldn’t imagine it. That I might control my future and try to make it turn out the way I wanted was completely beyond my horizon. Everything was of the moment, I took everything as it came and acted on the basis of premises I didn’t even know myself, and without realizing this is what I did.

The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion.
The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future.
Instead, time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.

The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of the future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future – such a future as mine – to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.

Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.

...which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay...

That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.

We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.

Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these
children: behind them a past forever destroyed, still quivering on its
ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the
aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between
these two worlds — like the ocean which separates the Old World from the
New — something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage,
traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship trailing
thick clouds of smoke; the present, in a word, which separates the past
from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resembles
both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one treads on
living matter or on dead refuse.