We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
ALAN LIGHTMANTime is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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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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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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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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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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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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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
ALAN LIGHTMAN






