Alan Lightman Quotes

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.

Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.

it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.

I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.