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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.

Alan Lightman

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Achievement Age Fact Flood Great Image Megabit Planet So Throughout
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Happy Joy One Pain Stuck Time Tragedy World
In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Cell Clamp Head Phone Restaurant Walk
I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

E-mail Philosophy Position Taken
The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Blurry Faster Get Go Hold Move Really Reason Something Thing World
One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Arcade Instrument Arch Avenue Beneath Browse Build Converse Down Enter Friend Sandstone Time
Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Law Nature Order
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Author Fabulist Fiction Imagination Long Love People Such Write Time
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

Book Character Pilot Strangle
I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Came Dream Happy Inspiration Out Person Single Still Way
Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Aftre Begin Down Ecept Gof Sit Universe
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?
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Breeze Disturbance Firmness Illusion Image Kaleidoscope Past Pattern Sudden
Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Community Lose Overstate Word Writer
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Best Center Go Near Not Say Some Time
Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Nature Purposeless Simply
To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Careful Over Point Take

The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.

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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.

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Popular Authors

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