When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
ALAN LIGHTMANI 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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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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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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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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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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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
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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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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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