Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
ALAN LIGHTMANSons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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“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.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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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.
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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.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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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.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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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…
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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