The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
ALAN LIGHTMANYou make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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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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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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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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I 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.
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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.
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
ALAN LIGHTMAN