The night that seemed endless hours before is now slipping from your fingers, ticking by as it falls into the past and pushes you toward the future.

Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

Hermetic quote Morgenstern Circus future

Consider also:

  1. “The past is the cosmopolitan’s mother country, the universal fatherland, an endless library.”
  2. “But raise no head; I know thee, breast and thigh, Lips, hair and eyes and mouth: I will not die But thou come with me o’er the gate of death. So, blood and body furious with breath That pants through foaming kisses, let us stay Gripped hard together to keep life away, Mouths drowned in murder, never satiate, Kissing away the hard decrees of Fate, Kissing insatiable in mad desire Kisses whose agony may never tire, Kissing the gates of hell, the sword of God, Each unto each a serpent or a rod, A well of wine and fire, each unto each, Whose lips are fain convulsively to reach A higher heaven, a deeper hell.”
  3. “To the Ancient Egyptians the most eminent man was he who had by hard training gained supremacy over the Elements, from which his own body and the Manifested World were alike formed; one whose Will had risen Phœnix-like from the ashes of his desires; one whose Intuition, cleansed from the stains of material illusions, was a clear mirror in which he could perceive the Past, the Present and the Future.”
  4. “There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times.”
  5. “All night no change, no whisper. Scarce a breath But lips closed hard upon the cup of death To drain its sweetest poison. Scarce a sigh Beats the dead hours out; scarce a melody Of measured pulses quickened with the blood Of that desire which pours its deadly flood Through soul and shaken body; scarce a thought But sense through spirit most divinely wrought To perfect feeling; only through the lips Electric ardour kindles, flashes, slips Through all the circle to her lips again And thence, unwavering, flies to mine, to drain All pleasure in one draught.”