The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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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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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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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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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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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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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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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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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMAN