“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
ALAN LIGHTMANOne metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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 still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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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’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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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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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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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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