As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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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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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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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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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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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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Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
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Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN