I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
ALAN LIGHTMANOne 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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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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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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