The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
ALAN LIGHTMANFranz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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“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.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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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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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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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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