Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties

My experience of time is mostly like my experience with maps. Flat, moving in a more or less straight line form one point to another. Being in time, in a continuous present, is to look at a map and not see the hills shapes and undulations, but only the flat form. There is no sense of dimension, only a feeling for the surface. Thinking about time is more dizzy and precipitous.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular – an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (Vintage, 1990) pp. 89-90