Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
ALAN LIGHTMANI have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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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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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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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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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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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 think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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One 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.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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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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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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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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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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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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A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
ALAN LIGHTMAN