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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.

Alan Lightman

To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Atheist Belief Both End Room Spiritual Think
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Along Bluefish Make Mind Predetrmine Second Squirm Unyield Wriggle
“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ambitious Book Diagnosis Far Great Hope Most
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ahead Back Broot Look People Skip Time
Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Escape Father Free Immortality Own Person Shadow Some Son
Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Advance Imagination Revolution Sense Species World
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Document Explode Held Immortality Mentioned Slight
it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Hard Ignore Invent Real Sometimes Tell There
Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Different Direction Each Future Move Time
The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Brood Children Father Monogamous Mother Osprey Summer Through Watch
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Decision Event Glance Happen Lose Occur Reality
If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Character Creation Fiction Infrared Tell Think Wonderful
“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Change Diagnosis Draft Significant Ten Through Whole Wholesale
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Discipline Instruction Instrument Law Novel Other Pedagogical Physics
Continents of memory had been lost.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Been Continent Lost Memory
Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ahead Bonelike Extend Fossilize Future Infinitely Past Rigid Structure Time Well

The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.

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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.

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