That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
ALAN LIGHTMANI still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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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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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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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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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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And 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.
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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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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
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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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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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I value my correspondence with writers…
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