“I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time…”
A Zed and Two Noughts
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Peter Greenaway 266
British film director 1942Related quotes
“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
Variant: I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 15.
Context: It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
An explanation of relativity which he gave to his secretary Helen Dukas to convey to non-scientists and reporters, as quoted in Best Quotes of '54, '55, l56 (1957) by James B. Simpson; also in Expandable Quotable Einstein (2005) edited by Alice Calaprice
William Hermanns recorded a series of four conversations he had with Einstein and published them in his book Einstein and the Poet (1983), quoting Einstein saying this variant in a 1948 conversation: "To simplify the concept of relativity, I always use the following example: if you sit with a girl on a garden bench and the moon is shining, then for you the hour will be a minute. However, if you sit on a hot stove, the minute will be an hour." ( p. 87 http://books.google.com/books?id=QXCyjj6T5ZUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q&f=false)
In the 1985 book Einstein in America, Jamie Sayen wrote "Einstein devised the following explanation for her [Helen Dukas] to give when asked to explain relativity: An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour." ( p. 130 http://books.google.com/books?ei=yma3TsDWK8WciQL63smAAQ&ct=book-thumbnail&id=vs3aAAAAMAAJ&dq=sayen+%22einstein+in+america%22&q=pretty+girl#search_anchor)
Attributed in posthumous publications
Variant: When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
“A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
"As a Child I Walked"
A Night Without Armor (1998)
“I always sit here like a majestic prick between two balls.”
“Sometimes I sits and thinks. Other times I sits and drinks, but mostly I just sits.”
Source: First Third & Other Writings - Revised & Expanded Edition Together With A New Prologue