We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.
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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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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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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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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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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.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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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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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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