We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
ALAN LIGHTMANJust 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…
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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?
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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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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
ALAN LIGHTMAN