Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
ALAN LIGHTMANAt every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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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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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.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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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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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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