Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
ALAN LIGHTMANI go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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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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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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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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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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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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Everyone shares the same fate.
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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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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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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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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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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 would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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