The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
ALAN LIGHTMANAfter 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMAN