Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
ALAN LIGHTMANSadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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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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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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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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Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
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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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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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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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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.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN