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  • Alan Lightman Quotes   148
  • One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Time Quotes , Church Bells Quotes
  • A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Years Quotes
  • We've lost our way, we have lost our centeredness. We don't have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what's important. I would bet most people don't have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don't have to be sitting, they can be walking.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes
  • I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Atheist Quotes
  • I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay. I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness. Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Guiding Principles Quotes , Focus Quotes
  • "The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years. Just didn't know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out...
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Insecure Quotes
  • Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Learning Quotes , Past Quotes
  • The Book of Telling tells of a woman's journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Father Quotes