“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 LIGHTMANThe 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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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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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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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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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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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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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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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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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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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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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
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