Alan Lightman Quotes

Every white man seemed to have a great concern about time. We enjoyed time, they measured it…. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we never thought of them.

We parcel up time into years and months and days because without compartmentalisation the tundra of time is impossible to navigate.

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.

Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time--weeks, months, years, decades even.

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.

all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

What Time Is It? You Mean Now?

Before you measure the years, you measure the days.

But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.

The bell strikes One. We take no note of time But from its loss. To give it then a tongue Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke, I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright, It is the knell of my departed hours.

History is like a clock, it tells you your time of day.

What a funny watch!’ she remarked. ‘It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!’ ‘Why should it?’ muttered the Hatter. ‘Does YOUR watch tell you what year it is?’ ‘Of course not,’ Alice replied very readily: ‘but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.’ ‘Which is just the case with MINE,’ said the Hatter.

Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.

A year shall I endure for every day that passes until your return.

CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.

It's proven that how time moves for you depends on where you are in the universe. It's relative to beings and other places. But on the level of being here on earth, if you are aware in a moment, one second can last a year. And if you are unaware, your whole childhood, your whole life can pass by in six seconds. But it’s also such a thing that you can get lost in.

What is time? If I am not asked, I know; if I am asked, I don't.

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever?

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

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

There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock that is always right - except when you rely upon it, and then it is more wrong than you would think a clock could be in a civilized country.