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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.

Alan Lightman

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

E-mail Everything Fast Faster Food Goten Mentality Representative Think
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Complete Different Reader Sense Something Way
Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Air Begin Breathe Central Existence Intelligent Like Passage Time
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].
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Cost Determine Free Future Immortality No Person Such Whole Woman
To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Atheist Belief Both End Room Spiritual Think
Everyone shares the same fate.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Everyone Fate Same Share
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ahead Back Broot Look People Skip Time
Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Clarity Right See Wrong
It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Bring Develop Emotional Excite Express Nurture Side Student Use
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Character Pilot Strangle
While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ahead Back Brood Doubt Look People
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Course Depend Done Frighten Make Previous
Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Always Been Begin Book End I Idea People Person Portrait Write
We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Expect Not Often See
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Computer E-mail Live Merciful Service Summer Talk Telephone
We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

During Important Listen Ourselves Thing Time

We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.

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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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