I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
ALAN LIGHTMANI also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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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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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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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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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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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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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
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You 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.
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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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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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I believe that we need to slow down.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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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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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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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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