If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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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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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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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
ALAN LIGHTMAN