The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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 anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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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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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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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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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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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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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.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
ALAN LIGHTMAN