The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
ALAN LIGHTMANMy second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body 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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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
ALAN LIGHTMAN