I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
ALAN LIGHTMANSons 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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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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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.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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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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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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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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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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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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If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN