Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
ALAN LIGHTMANSuch is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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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.
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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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“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.
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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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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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