I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
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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?
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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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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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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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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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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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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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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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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There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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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.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN