If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
ALAN LIGHTMAN