"Time Is What Keeps Everything from Happening at Once"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I may already have drawn attention to the fact that I saw a paraphrase of this on a lavatory wall at one of our great universities in the early 1970's.  I believe it was,

  "Time is God's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once."

  JL

Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Fred Shapiro
Subject: "Time Is What Keeps Everything from Happening at Once"
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In The Yale Book of Quotations I have the following quote:

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
Ray Cummings, "The Time Professor" (1921)

A purchaser of the YBQ has written to me to say that "The line is in Cummings'
most famous story, 'The Girl in the Golden Atom', which was originally
published in All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1919." His source is The Giant
Anthology of Science Fiction, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend,
Merlin Press, Inc., New York, 1954. The quotation is from Chapter V, "The World
in the Ring", on p. 148 of his copy. Here is the quotation, with some context:

"To get a conception of this change you must analyze definitely what time is.
We measure and mark it by years, months, and so forth, down to minutes and
seconds, all based upon the movements of our earth around its sun. But that is
the measurement of time, not time itself. How would you describe time?"

The Big Business Man smiled. "Time," he said, "is what keeps everything from
happening at once."

"Very clever," laughed the Chemist.

Is anyone able to verify whether the same passage appears in the original
magazine publication?

Fred Shapiro

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