"Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go"
About this Quote
The familiar comfort of saying time goes on is turned inside out. Time does not march away with our days; it remains, a constant field, while we are the ones who move, change, age, and eventually exit. The shift strips a convenient scapegoat of its power. Instead of blaming a mysterious force for loss and change, the line locates motion and impermanence in us. Time stays, indifferent and available. We go, which makes our choices, attention, and presence the meaningful variables.
Linda Ellerbee built a career observing change with wry clarity, from late-night network news to the long-running Nick News that treated young viewers as smart citizens. Her style favored plain speech that punctures cliches, and this reversal does just that. It also echoes a journalist’s vantage point: decades of headlines pass across the same datelines and desks; the newsroom remains while generations of reporters, subjects, and audiences move through it. Ellerbee once titled a memoir And So It Goes, a nod to the flow of events and our passage through them.
The idea carries practical and humane consequences. If time does not heal, we do, within time. Time provides space; healing is an act. If time does not steal youth, we trade it for experience, love, and work. That recognition can foster gratitude rather than resentment, urgency rather than panic. It invites a steadier grief: losses do not drift away on a river of minutes; we carry them until, by effort and mercy, they ease.
There is even a philosophical hum beneath it. Think of time as the stage, not the actor; as the map, not the traveler. The scene persists; casts change. That perspective can be bracing and freeing: bracing because it faces mortality without euphemism, freeing because it returns agency. Since we go, we can decide how to go, attentive rather than distracted, purposeful rather than swept along by a story we failed to write.
Linda Ellerbee built a career observing change with wry clarity, from late-night network news to the long-running Nick News that treated young viewers as smart citizens. Her style favored plain speech that punctures cliches, and this reversal does just that. It also echoes a journalist’s vantage point: decades of headlines pass across the same datelines and desks; the newsroom remains while generations of reporters, subjects, and audiences move through it. Ellerbee once titled a memoir And So It Goes, a nod to the flow of events and our passage through them.
The idea carries practical and humane consequences. If time does not heal, we do, within time. Time provides space; healing is an act. If time does not steal youth, we trade it for experience, love, and work. That recognition can foster gratitude rather than resentment, urgency rather than panic. It invites a steadier grief: losses do not drift away on a river of minutes; we carry them until, by effort and mercy, they ease.
There is even a philosophical hum beneath it. Think of time as the stage, not the actor; as the map, not the traveler. The scene persists; casts change. That perspective can be bracing and freeing: bracing because it faces mortality without euphemism, freeing because it returns agency. Since we go, we can decide how to go, attentive rather than distracted, purposeful rather than swept along by a story we failed to write.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
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