Home > Topic > Five minutes
1 " A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. "
― Quinn Loftis , Into the Fae (Gypsy Healers, #1)
2 " It is quite natural and inevitable that, if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world and five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God. "
― William Ralph Inge
3 " I'm a big believer in first impressions," he finally said. " Tell me what your first thought was when Jason walked into the courtroom." Taylor took a sip of her drink and grinned. This one was easy. " I vowed to hate him forever." Jeremy's brown eyes twinkled at this. " That's exactly what I said nineteen years ago, five minutes after he first walked into our dorm room. "
4 " It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic. "
― Neil Gaiman
5 " A thousand years ago five minutes wereEqual to forty ounces of fine sand.Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime andInfinite aftertime: above your headThey close like giant wings, and you are dead. "
― Vladimir Nabokov , Pale Fire
6 " Imagine repeating the power words ‘love’ or ‘happiness’ for five minutes twice a day for the rest of your life, amazing things could happen. "
― Stephen Richards , Ask and the Universe Will Provide: A Straightforward Guide to Manifesting Your Dreams
7 " You feel it too, don’t you?” I don’t have to ask her what she’s talking about. I felt it the moment I grabbed her wrist to stop her from leaving. I felt it the moment I saw her hair fly by my face, and before “that when I noticed her walking across campus. She’s different and we could be something different together. Something astounding. Something you encounter once in a lifetime, if that. It’s been five minutes and I can already tell that. "
― J. Saman , Start Over (Start Again #2)
8 " I'm beginning to wonder when the Doomsday Clock will be reset to five minutes before 1939? "
9 " A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. "
― C.S. Lewis , Mere Christianity
10 " How will we ever tell you apart?" Collins asked, unable to resist the question." It's really quite simple, sir, once you know us," the spokesman assured him. " If he's talking, it's probably George, because Geoff is a quiet lad; if he's dancing a hornpipe, it's Geoff, because hornpipes make me dizzy." " You're George, then?" " Yes, sir - the eldest." " By five minutes and fifty-five seconds," added Geoffrey, frowning." Five minutes and fifty-nine seconds," George corrected him calmly. "
11 " I am insane, does that surprise you? Ha! I think my mind is crumbling, just like crackers. If I had written five minutes earlier I would have wept, if I had written ten minutes earlier I would have told you to leave me alone, if I wait any longer I won’t write at all. "
12 " I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard. "
― Bill Bryson , A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
13 " It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform. "
14 " I made the valuable discovery that practicing wasn't a matter of time at all. It was a matter of intensity. Five minutes spent working consciously and hard at the elimination of an error, was worth five hours just playing away ignoring errors as if they hadn't happened. "
― Leonard Wibberley
15 " There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough.We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer. "
― Alistair MacLean , The Guns of Navarone
16 " He was ruining it. Five minutes before, he’d looked at her with desire and she’d thought finally. Finally, someone saw her. Finally, someone wanted her and she would know what it was like to be a woman. She would know what it felt like to have another person’s hands on her. But now he looked at her with misplaced compassion. As if she were so desperate to get laid she had missed something. As if there was some man waiting in the wings. There wasn’t. This was it, her final chance for pleasure and with every question, with every word, he ruined it. "
17 " She's still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn't have electricity until she started elementary school, and she'd never seen a train until the tracks of the Koumi line were laid in Saku. It's exactly as if she were born in the Edo period. These days, you only have to drive for five minutes to find a sparkling clean convenience store, with bright lights above shelves stocked with everything you could possibly need. Land that used to be fields of mulberry bushes is now crisscrossed by smooth, wide roads lined with video rental stores and fast food restaurants.I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By " the inside of her head" I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed. "
18 " Nothing is more to mastery than practice and skills. Studies have shown that practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement, you must create those habits. "
19 " Just five minutes, God, I chant like some hostage negotiator on the brink of a resolution. Five minutes alone. Please, please. Please. "
― Shannon Celebi
20 " …I interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is Prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often to you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes – well, maybe seven. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often. Many of those I talked to experienced prayer more as a burden than as a pleasure. They regarded it as important, even paramount, and felt guilty about their failure, blaming themselves. Does this sound familiar? (pp. 14/Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?) "
― Philip Yancey , Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?