Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
ALAN LIGHTMANWriters are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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.
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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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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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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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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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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN