Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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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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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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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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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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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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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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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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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
ALAN LIGHTMAN