Everyone shares the same fate.
ALAN LIGHTMANYou say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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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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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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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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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
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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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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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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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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.
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Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…
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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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There is a place where time stands still.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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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 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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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
ALAN LIGHTMAN