Alan Lightman Quotes

Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.

Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

Time is an illusion anyway. You can create as much time as you want.

Time narrows or expands according to how we approach it. It varies with a man’s breadth, with his heart.

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

I had to let myself imagine a calendar with no lines; when every single day is being predetermined six months in advance, there's no more fluidity to time.

Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.

The way we metabolize our experience of time influences our biological clock.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

She had learned, in her life, that time lived inside you. You are time, you breathe time. When she'd been young, she'd had an insatiable hunger for more of it, though she hadn't understood why. Now she held inside her a cacophony of times and lately it drowned out the world. The apple tree was still nice to lie near. They peony, for its scent, also fine. When she walked through the woods (infrequently now) she picked her way along the path, making way for the boy inside to run along before her. It could be hard to choose the time outside over the time within.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

Because time isn't something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.

Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.

I was thinking about how disjointedly time seemed to flow, passing in a blur at times, with single images standing out more clearly than others. And then, at other times, every second was significant, etched in my mind.

Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

‎The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.