Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnd 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country… people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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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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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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