Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnother strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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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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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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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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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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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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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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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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