Time & Perspective Quote by Jim Bishop

Books turn time into a remote control: pause, rewind, fast-forward. Jim Bishop, a journalist who made a career out of compressing sprawling lives and public events into readable narrative, isn’t praising reading as a polite hobby. He’s naming the seduction at the heart of nonfiction and the novel alike: the ability to step outside the calendar and live inside a story’s clock.

The intent is partly personal discovery and partly professional credo. For a reporter, time is usually a tyrant: deadlines, editions, the relentless now. Bishop flips that tyranny. In a book, “stand still” suggests refuge, a shelter from the day’s demands. “Retreat” points to memory and history, but also to the psychological retreat people take when they need distance from their own lives. Then the slyest move: “fly into the future.” That’s not prophecy; it’s projection. Reading rehearses possible selves and possible worlds. It’s a way of trying on outcomes without paying the real-world price.

The subtext carries a mid-century confidence in print as a kind of time machine, before feeds and notifications chopped attention into small, nervous units. Bishop wrote in an era when mass-market books and magazines shaped common reference points; a reader could genuinely feel relocated by words on a page. The line works because it’s tactile and kinetic: time doesn’t merely “pass” in books, it obeys. That’s the quiet power he’s admitting, and the quiet warning, too: once you learn time can be edited, ordinary life can start to feel like the rough draft.