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.
ALAN LIGHTMANAll writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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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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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
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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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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.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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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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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
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If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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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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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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