"Some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)
"Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization." (Rabindranath Tagore, "The Meaning of Art", 1926)
"[...] the time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve." (Robert H Wilson, "A Flight Into Time", Wonder Stories, 1931)
"Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and) ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning." (Stephen V Benét," By the Waters of Babylon", 1937)
"The very basis of human civilization was leisure [...] spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment." (Edmond Hamilton, "The Ephemerae", 1938)
"Man has natural three-dimensional limits, and he also has four-dimensional ones, considering time as an extension. When he reaches those limits, he ceases to grow and mature, and forms rigidly within the mold of those limiting walls. It is stasis, which is retrogression unless all else stands still as well. A man who reaches his limits is tending toward subhumanity. Only when he becomes superhuman in time and space can immortality become practical." (Henry Kuttner & Catherine L Moore [aka Lewis Padgett], "Time Enough", 1946)
"Space and Time aren’t real, apart. And they aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all around us." (Jack Williamson, "The Legion of Space", 1947)
"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity." (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)
"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to Man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... The Twilight Zone." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone" [TV series] 1959)
"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb." (Frederik Pohl, "Day Million", 1966)
"An infinity of universes swim in superspace, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some future transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife", 1979)
"Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea." (Gregory Benford, "Timescape", 1980)
"The dimension of the imagination is much more complex than those of time and space, which are very junior dimensions indeed." (Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic", 1983)
"Nothing in those years matched the impact of the equable, incontrovertible statement that I did not matter, that my life was of no moment to anyone but myself. We accept that only one person in a million has real importance to the race but each of us remains the centre of his universe, the pivot of energy and mind. That man told me in a single sentence that the world would not flicker if I ceased to exist, that it would have affected nothing if I had never existed and that my continued existence would affect nothing in the stream of time." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)
"History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call 'world lines' on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going - it is a matter of simple extrapolation." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)
"There is a way of looking far into the distant past and seeing everything that happened there. The same method can be used to observe distant events while they are actually happening - and also, of course, events that took place both long ago and far away. It is even possible to spy upon what is occurring in the alternative universes - those parts of the polycosmos which, unreified in our own time-line, exist for us only as the sites of dreams." (John Grant, "The World", 1992)
"We live forever, we transform ourselves, we transform worlds, solar systems, we ship across interstellar space, we defy time and deny death, but the one thing we cannot recreate is memory [...]" (Ian MacDonald, "The Days of Solomon Gursky", 1998)
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