If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMANHe hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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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.
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Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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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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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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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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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.
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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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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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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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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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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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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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