Alan Lightman Quotes

Eternity: a moment standing still for ever.

Time seems to stop in certain places.

I have lived in a flurry of images, but I will go out in a freeze frame.

Moon appears to shine and light the sky with the help of some fireflies, wonder how they have the power to shine?

In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.

The fireflies o'er the meadow In pulses come and go.

My fancies are fireflies Specks of living light twinkling in the dark.

They'd been standing like that for thirty seconds of forever.

If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.

There were moments, of course. Those small spaces in time, too soon gone, when everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point, like the moment of change between the dark and the light, and when both and neither surround you.

I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.

Eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality.

If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.

Every instant of time... is a pinprick of eternity.

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.

On the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended oar.

The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone.There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.

The timeless moment. - The "moment" has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice.

echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.