People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
ALAN LIGHTMANTheir predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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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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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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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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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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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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Everyone shares the same fate.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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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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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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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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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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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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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
ALAN LIGHTMAN